Looking at a healthcare system made more unequal by Covid-19, Foresite Capital managing director Vik Bajaj recently launched an expansive plan to launch five innovative startups to address unmet need. Just weeks after the first of those biotechs emerged from stealth, a second has now uncloaked, and it’s got immunology in its sights.

Esker Therapeutics launched Wednesday with a $70 million Series A to pursue precision immunology targets backed by Foresite Labs’ analytics engine kickstarted by Bajaj’s team, the biotech said. Foresite footed the entire round for Esker as it continues to develop its pipeline and advance its lead compound.

When Cellares CEO and co-founder Fabian Gerlinghaus tore his ACL a few years ago, he was brought outside of a Bay Area hospital to the parking lot where he received an MRI inside a truck. He and his colleagues hope that the same can be done for cell therapy — one day — and they just received $82 million in funding to help do so.

Cellares on Wednesday bagged a Series B round, bringing its total funding to $100 million so far. Those funds will be used to develop the Cell Shuttle, a portable factory that Cellares hopes will disrupt the expensive and logistically complicated cell therapy manufacturing process.

Spark’s Luxturna made waves in 2017 when it was approved to treat inherited retinal degradation by replacing the mutated RPE65 gene with a normal copy. But instead of replacing a faulty gene to regain function, what if scientists could reprogram whole cells in vivo?

On Tuesday, a UK-based startup reeled in $17 million to pursue just that.

Mogrify set out in 2016 to pioneer a new class of in vivo reprogramming therapies in ophthalmology and use that same technology to transform the way ex vivo cell therapies are developed. The company first closed a Series A round in 2019. And now, investors are tacking on another $17 million, bringing the expanded round to $33 million in total.

The eye disease therapy market is a lucrative one but a pain for patients who must rely on invasive injections a few times per year. A Swiss biotech is hoping to rewrite the game with a pair of lead topical drugs, and it’s got a fresh round of cash in its war chest to get there.

Oculis has bagged a $57 million Series C it will use to advance lead drug OCS-01 into late-stage trials in its bid to unseat in-the-eye injectables for eye disease as well as push ahead another candidate, OCS-02, the company said Tuesday.

In his 46 AD compendium of medical treatments, Scribonius Largus, the court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, described a peculiar way to relieve headache.

Place a live torpedo fish — the black, flat, disc-looking fish also known as electric ray — on the place which is in pain, he instructed, until the pain ceases and the part grows numb. The purported effect? It would “immediately remove and permanently cure a headache, however long-lasting and intolerable.”

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The company behind the technology for AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine is prepped and ready to hit Nasdaq.

British biotech Vaccitech priced its IPO late Thursday night, pulling in a $110.5 million raise and will debut at the midpoint of their range at $17. It’s a quick public leap for the company, having completed a Series B just last month — though that crossover proved to be huge at $168 million.

In less than a year, Forge Biologics has grown its staff size from just four employees to more than 75, a sure sign of rapid growth from the Chris Garabedian-launched start up. Here’s another sign: the $120 million Series B financing round the company just announced.

The gene therapy CDMO secured funding from RA Capital Management, and participation from Perceptive Advisors, Surveyor Capital, Octagon Capital and Marshall Wace.

With the biotech boom in the US in full swing, more money than ever is flowing into the industry — but that gusher hasn’t fully translated across the pond. Now, a Danish biotech with some big-name backers has scored a record-high early fundraising round. Is it a one-off or a sign of things to come?

Copenhagen-based ADCendo has bagged a $62 million Series A round — the largest ever of its kind for a Danish biotech — to advance its pipeline of antibody-drug conjugates targeting uPARAP, a collagen scavenger receptor on some tumor cells, the company said Thursday.

The US government poured money into Moderna as it sought to speed its Covid-19 vaccine to market. In hindsight, the investments worked, and the US may end up investing about $6 billion in Moderna’s vaccine when all is said and done, according to a company SEC filing Wednesday.

The latest funds from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, up to $236 million more, will reimburse for Moderna’s costs associated with the vaccine’s Phase III clinical trial, as well as pharmacovigilance efforts to track the vaccine’s safety.