Can a lit­tle start­up equipped with an Eli Lil­ly castoff make it big with an on­col­o­gy IPO? In 2022?

The ex­ec­u­tive crew and back­ers at the lit­tle start­up Acrivon clear­ly aren’t averse to risk. They hand­ed over a mod­est $5 mil­lion in cash to phar­ma gi­ant Eli Lil­ly in or­der to pluck one of its mid-stage can­cer fail­ures off the shelves.

And now they’re jump­ing in­to the frigid wa­ters of Nas­daq to see if they can float a very rare IPO.

The back­sto­ry at Acrivon Ther­a­peu­tics starts more than three years ago, when Eli Lil­ly shoved their CHK1/2 drug prex­as­ert­ib in­to lim­bo, with­draw­ing it from the Phase II pipeline. What we didn’t know at the time was that the drug — aimed at ovar­i­an and oth­er sol­id tu­mors — had achieved an ORR of “29% at the sin­gle cen­ter Phase 2 ovar­i­an can­cer tri­al at NCI in the in­tent to treat, or ITT, pop­u­la­tion, and ap­prox­i­mate­ly 12% across the plat­inum-re­sis­tant ovar­i­an can­cer co­horts in the large Phase 2 mul­ti-cen­ter in­ter­na­tion­al tri­al spon­sored by Lil­ly.”

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