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Two promi­nent life sci­ences firms have teamed up to spon­sor a new SPAC that made its way to Nas­daq on Tues­day evening.

Deer­field Man­age­ment and ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners are back­ing the blank check com­pa­ny known as DA32 Life Sci­ence Tech Ac­qui­si­tion Corp., which priced at $200 mil­lion Mon­day, the firms an­nounced. The pair is team­ing up with Cal­i­for­nia-based VC firm Sec­tion 32, whose man­ag­ing part­ner Steven Kaf­ka will run the SPAC.

Ax­ios had first re­port­ed a SPAC might be in the works back in ear­ly June.

Though ARCH pre­vi­ous­ly launched a blank check com­pa­ny when Bob Nelsen and for­mer Ver­tex CEO Jeff Lei­den got a $500 mil­lion SPAC off the ground in March, Nelsen won’t be in­volved in this ef­fort. The high-pro­file in­vestor was not men­tioned in the blank check com­pa­ny’s S-1.

In­stead, it will be ARCH co-founder Kei­th Cran­dell run­ning point for the firm, as Cran­dell nabs a seat on the SPAC’s board of di­rec­tors. He’ll join Deer­field part­ner An­drew El­Bardis­si and SPAC CFO Christo­pher Wolfe, who the S-1 said has man­aged fi­nan­cials for at least three pre­vi­ous blank check com­pa­nies for Deer­field pri­or to their merg­ers.

Wolfe is the on­ly di­rec­tor with any per­son­al shares in the blank check com­pa­ny, tak­ing home a 2.5% stake.

Kaf­ka, mean­while, has com­plet­ed his meta­mor­pho­sis from his pre­vi­ous stint as a biotech CEO. Be­gin­ning in April 2019, Kaf­ka worked as founder and CEO of can­cer blood test com­pa­ny Thrive Ear­li­er De­tec­tion, be­fore Ex­act Sci­ences bought it out in an Oc­to­ber 2020 cash and stock deal for up to $2.15 bil­lion.

Pri­or to join­ing Thrive, Kaf­ka had served as COO of Foun­da­tion Med­i­cine for about five years be­fore Roche ac­quired it for $2.4 bil­lion back in 2018.

Un­like the pre­vi­ous ARCH SPAC, which hint­ed to­ward a fo­cus on “tech­nolo­gies like wear­able sen­sors, re­mote con­tin­u­ous da­ta cap­ture, point of care di­ag­nos­tics, tele­health ca­pa­bil­i­ties and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence/ma­chine learn­ing tools,” the new blank check out­fit is pro­vid­ing few­er de­tails on po­ten­tial tar­gets.

The S-1 al­so in­clud­ed much of the boil­er­plate lan­guage that’s be­come com­mon through­out the SPAC boom of the last 12 to 18 months, in­clud­ing sev­er­al men­tions that the SPAC is “not pro­hib­it­ed” from pur­su­ing a merg­er with any of the di­rec­tors’ af­fil­i­at­ed com­pa­nies.

The mar­ket saw a mas­sive in­flux of SPACs at the be­gin­ning of the year, with more than 300 across all sec­tors be­ing filed or priced in the first quar­ter alone. But with that ac­tiv­i­ty came big­ger scruti­ny from reg­u­la­tors, with the SEC be­gin­ning to ask fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to vol­un­tar­i­ly pro­vide doc­u­ments over how they were in­ter­nal­ly polic­ing such blank check ef­forts.

Ac­tiv­i­ty has ramped back up since then, though not to the mar­ket’s pre­vi­ous heights. And the glut of SPACs has brought an uptick in merg­ers over the last few months, with near­ly a dozen life sci­ences re­verse merg­ers oc­cur­ring in the sec­ond quar­ter, per the End­points News tal­ly. Over­all, SPACs have brought more than $17 bil­lion to the biotech sec­tor in 2021.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.