Six weeks af­ter Bahi­ja Jal­lal’s crew at TCR pi­o­neer Im­muno­core rolled out an up­beat pre­sen­ta­tion on their lead drug’s in­ter­im Phase III da­ta, the biotech has scooped up an ex­tra $175 mil­lion to back their prospec­tive com­mer­cial launch.

Jal­lal, who raised $130 mil­lion last spring, has brought in a $75 mil­lion C round and added $100 mil­lion in debt for the com­pa­ny, bring­ing the to­tal raised so far to $620 mil­lion. Im­muno­core got off to a hot start in 2015 with a mon­ster $320 mil­lion launch round, a record for a UK biotech. But CEO founder Eliot Forster had a hard time keep­ing a grip on the val­u­a­tion he start­ed with, which ul­ti­mate­ly trig­gered an over­haul in the C-suite that brought in Jal­lal.

Her bet on Im­muno­core paid off with promis­ing piv­otal da­ta in late No­vem­ber, the first such event among the TCR class, which has had its share of ups and downs over the years.

At the first planned in­ter­im read­out for the in­tent-to-treat, all-com­ers group in uveal melanoma for tebenta­fusp (IM­Cgp100), Im­muno­core’s re­search team nailed down an im­pres­sive haz­ard ra­tio of 0.51 against physi­cians’ choice SOC.

The biotech al­so not­ed:

Al­though not yet ma­ture, the Ka­plan-Meier es­ti­mates sug­gest a 1-year OS rate of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 73% vs 58%, re­spec­tive­ly.

Ox­ford Fi­nance pro­vid­ed the loan and ex­ist­ing in­vestors in the syn­di­cate pre­ferred the C round.

Im­muno­core is rare among biotechs with a late-stage as­set look­ing for a reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval. Most com­pa­nies would have al­ready filed for an IPO by now. Jal­lal has yet to pull that trig­ger, but that may well change in the not-so-dis­tant fu­ture.

Amid burgeoning efforts to create a new type of cell therapy out of regulatory T cells — whether by channeling or blocking their immunosuppressive power — Quell Therapeutics wants to shoot for a first.

If everything goes well, the Syncona-backed biotech will be in the clinic early next year, marking what it calls the historic feat of dosing a patient with a CAR-Treg with multiple edited genes.

In the same way that the FDA signs off on flu vaccines every year without requiring large clinical trials to measure their efficacy, the FDA may employ a similar strategy in authorizing variant-focused versions of the mRNA vaccines.

As the world braces for more data on the latest variant Omicron, which may reduce vaccine efficacy, top vaccine developers like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have promised they can pull together a new vaccine targeted against a specific Covid variant in about 100 days. Since Omicron emerged last week, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and J&J have all said they’ve begun work on Omicron-specific vaccines, if needed.

HotSpot Therapeutics, the allostery-focused biotech that works on what it calls “natural hotspots” — hence the name — is getting a bit hotter in its valuation from investors. And to that end they’ve raised $100 million.

The four-year-old AI computational biotech started by two former Nimbus execs announced this morning that it closed its Series C round right at the line of a 9-figure investment, courtesy of some big investors.