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.

The firehose of biopharma news is gushing these days.

That’s why broader and deeper is the theme for 2021 at Endpoints. You can expect new coverage outside our core R&D focus, with deeper reporting in some key areas. When John Carroll and I launched Endpoints nearly five years ago, we were wading in waist-high waters. Now we’re a team of 25 full-time staffers (and growing) with plans to cover the flood of biopharma news, Endpoints-style.

About 15 months since closing a $28 million Series A, a San Diego protein-degradation upstart returned to the venture well Thursday with an extension of that round and some new hires, including one of the city’s best-connected biotech execs.

Plexium has bagged an additional $35 million in financing, the biotech said, money that will push undisclosed oncology and immuno-oncology programs into the clinic. In addition, longtime industry vet Mike Grey is jumping on as chairman of the board, and two others from Thursday’s leads — Adam Goulburn from Lux Capital and Rob Hopfner from Pivotal BioVentures — joined the board too.

Eli Lilly says bamlanivimab lowered the risk of contracting symptomatic Covid-19 in a first-of-its-kind trial involving nursing home residents and staff, paving the way for a new option to protect against the virus.

But how big of an impact it might have, and what role it will play, at a time vaccines are being rolled out to the exact population it is targeting still remains unclear.

Among 965 participants in the study — all of whom tested negative for the coronavirus at baseline — the number of symptomatic cases reported in the bamlanivimab arm was 57% lower than that in the placebo arm (odds ratio 0.43, p=0.00021). In addition to that primary endpoint, all secondary endpoints reached statistical significance.

As reports crop up that deliveries of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine are being unexpectedly cut, Italy wonders if it can take the vaccine developers to court, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

After its shipment for this week was cut by 29%, the Italian government consulted its attorney general about taking legal action, the WSJ reported. Pfizer and BioNTech had warned the EU and Canada last week that their allocations would be reduced as Pfizer upgrades its Belgium factory. What Italy says it doesn’t appreciate, though, is the short notice.

Seven years after the FDA first approved Esbriet, the blockbuster Roche IPF drug is getting an expedited review for a second indication.

On Thursday, the agency gave Esbriet priority review for unclassified interstitial lung diseases, or forms of pulmonary inflammation and scarring that don’t fit easily into the over 200 known types of ILD. The move comes 10 months after Esbriet received breakthrough designation and sets Roche up for a decision by May.