The fa­ther-and-son team at Mi­NA Ther­a­peu­tics is on a roll.

Just weeks af­ter snag­ging a $25 mil­lion up­front and a trea­sure map with close to $1.25 bil­lion in mile­stones from Eli Lil­ly, the phar­ma gi­ant is back with a $15 mil­lion eq­ui­ty sweet­en­er.

A qui­et play­er for the first decade of its ex­is­tence, Mi­NA Ther­a­peu­tics has been rack­ing up deals and dol­lars in the past 2 years. In ad­di­tion to the Lil­ly pact, As­traZeneca signed up with the Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don spin­out along with Servi­er.

Nagy Habib

As End­points News writer Ja­son Mast re­port­ed in May, the com­pa­nies have been lured by the re­search work that Nagy Habib has been do­ing on small ac­ti­vat­ing RNA: These strands func­tion sim­i­lar­ly to the small in­ter­fer­ing RNA that has turned Al­ny­lam in­to a $15 bil­lion com­pa­ny but in re­verse, not­ed Mast. In­stead of hi­jack­ing cel­lu­lar ma­chin­ery to turn the vol­ume down on a gene, they hi­jack it to turn the vol­ume way up.

If they play their saR­NA cards right, the biotech be­lieves it can com­pete as a ma­jor new play­er along­side RNAi or mR­NA.

Nagy Habib’s son, CEO Robert Habib, was al­ready talk­ing up the idea of rais­ing a new round for the com­pa­ny. Now they have a com­mit­ment from Lil­ly to help swell the fi­nal tal­ly, with the help of a ma­jor league en­dorse­ment for the plat­form play.

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.

While falling behind the biggest PD-(L)1 drugs in terms of sales, Roche has looked to carve out a space for its Tecentriq with a growing expertise in lung cancer. The drug will now take an early lead in the sought-after adjuvant setting — but competitors are on the way.

The FDA on Friday approved Tecentriq as an adjuvant therapy for patients with Stage II-IIIA non small cell lung cancer with PD-(L)1 scores greater than or equal to 1, making it the first drug of its kind approved in an early setting that covers around 40% of all NSCLC patients.

Three new entities priced their public debuts late Thursday and early Friday, including a SPAC, a traditional Nasdaq IPO and a Chinese biotech joining the Hong Kong Index.

Shanghai-based Abbisko Therapeutics raised the most money of the triumvirate, garnering $226 million in its Hong Kong debut and pricing at HK$12.46, or roughly $1.60 in US dollars. The blank check company followed up with a $150 million raise, while MiNK Therapeutics priced on Nasdaq at $12 per share and a $40 million raise.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Friday voted 19-0 in favor of authorizing a second shot of J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine to follow at least two months after the initial dose.

Regulators don’t have to follow VRBPAC’s recommendation, but they almost always do. Considering that the CDC’s advisory committee has already been set to review the expanded EUA, VRBPAC’s recommendation is likely to be adopted.

The FDA has another adcomm coming down the pipeline — this time on Covid-19 oral antiviral molnupiravir.

The federal agency’s advisory committee will meet on November 30th to go over Merck and Ridgeback’s EUA request for their investigational antiviral drug, and discuss the available data supporting its use in Covid-19 patients.

This comes two weeks after Merck claimed that their antiviral pill reduced the chance that newly diagnosed Covid-19 patients would be hospitalized or die by 50%. The pharma made the announcement after interim data on 775 patients in their clinical trial showed the antiviral’s potential.