One of “Phar­ma Bro” Mar­tin Shkre­li’s for­mer biotechs came back from the dead dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic thanks to its drug can­di­date tar­get­ing cy­tokine storms. Now, that com­pa­ny has scored it­self a place in a NI­AID-spon­sored tri­al.

Hu­mani­gen $HGEN, trad­ing for 46 cents per share as re­cent­ly as mid-March, an­nounced Mon­day af­ter­noon that its lenzilum­ab will be test­ed in com­bi­na­tion with remde­sivir in NI­AID’s Big Ef­fect Tri­al, ef­fec­tive­ly cat­e­go­riz­ing it as a high-pri­or­i­ty Covid-19 ther­a­peu­tic can­di­date. The drug com­bo will be test­ed against remde­sivir, a broad-spec­trum an­tivi­ral that has shown in ear­ly stud­ies to treat some symp­toms of Covid-19, and a place­bo.

Need­less to say, Hu­mani­gen CEO Cameron Dur­rant is quite ex­cit­ed by the news.

“This is ar­guably the world’s fore­most re­search for pub­lic health, gov­ern­ment-sup­port­ed or­ga­ni­za­tion,” Dur­rant told End­points News. “And they se­lect­ed lenzilum­ab to be a par­tic­i­pant in this pro­gram. We think that that’s ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly val­i­dat­ing.”

Dur­rant couldn’t com­ment on the time­line for the tri­al, cit­ing the NIH’s spon­sor­ship. NI­AID couldn’t be im­me­di­ate­ly reached for re­quests to com­ment.

Be­fore the pan­dem­ic, Hu­mani­gen was last in the news about three years ago when it was de­vel­op­ing a drug to treat Cha­gas dis­ease, but got beat­en to the punch by a non­prof­it group. What had been a promis­ing pro­gram be­came a dud and sent in­vestors flee­ing.

But since mid-March, when com­pa­nies around the world were look­ing at ex­ist­ing drugs to treat Covid-19, lenzilum­ab has been in the spot­light with its stock price up to near­ly $5 per share — an al­most 1,000 per­cent in­crease — in four months. Hu­mani­gen is cur­rent­ly en­gag­ing in its own Phase III tri­al, and Dur­rant in­sists this won’t be an­oth­er mishap like three years ago.

Though a fail­ure on Covid-19 here would like­ly pop this bal­loon in­stant­ly, the Cha­gas can­di­date “was a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent pro­gram and com­plete­ly in the rearview mir­ror. So, of course, we’re op­ti­mistic.”

Da­ta for lenzilum­ab in Covid-19 treat­ment are fair­ly lim­it­ed thus far; a non-con­trolled preprint of 12 pa­tients with coro­n­avirus-re­lat­ed se­vere pneu­mo­nia was re­leased last month. In that study, 11 of those pa­tients saw clin­i­cal im­prove­ments with an av­er­age time to dis­charge of five days, and they did not ex­hib­it any se­ri­ous ad­verse ef­fects.

The Cal­i­for­nia-based biotech’s main fo­cus is cy­tokine storm re­search and it has been study­ing the ef­fi­ca­cy of lenzilum­ab, a GM-CSF mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body, in treat­ing over­ac­tive im­mune re­spons­es seen in graft-ver­sus-host dis­ease and CAR-T can­cer ther­a­pies. This mech­a­nism has been a brighter spot in vac­cine re­search than the com­pet­ing Re­gen­eron-backed IL-6 treat­ment, which suf­fered a set­back in Phase II tri­als in late April.

Be­cause Covid-19 ex­hibits a sim­i­lar pathol­o­gy to GvHD and CAR-T re­spons­es, Dur­rant said lenzilum­ab treat­ments could be ap­plied to those in­fect­ed by the coro­n­avirus.

Back in 2015, Shkre­li and an in­vest­ment group bought a ma­jor­i­ty stake in the com­pa­ny, then known as Kalo­Bios. When Shkre­li was ar­rest­ed for se­cu­ri­ties fraud, Kalo­Bios fired him, de­clared bank­rupt­cy and re-emerged as Hu­mani­gen in 2016.

On June 2, Hu­mani­gen scored $71.8 mil­lion in pri­vate eq­ui­ty to help fund its Phase III lenzilum­ab tri­als and scale the drug should it be ap­proved.

For a look at all End­points News coro­n­avirus sto­ries, check out our spe­cial news chan­nel.

The old AveXis team is moving quickly in Dallas.

Three months ago, they launched Taysha with $30 million in Series A funding and a pipeline of gene therapies out of UT Southwestern. Now, they’ve announced an oversubscribed $95 million Series B. And the biotech is declining all interview requests on the news, the kind of broad silence that can indicate an IPO is in the pipeline.

Biotechs, including those relatively fresh off launch, have been going public at a frenzy since the pandemic began. Investors have showed a willingness to put upwards of $200 million to companies that have yet to bring a drug into the clinic. Still, if Taysha were to go public in the near future, it would be perhaps the shortest path from launch to IPO in recent biotech memory.

Boston, MA-based startup GentiBio landed a $20 million seed fund from three investors to dive into engineered regulatory T cell (EngTreg) development.

Marquee investors OrbiMed, Novartis Venture Fund and RA Capital Management have backed GentiBio’s mission to develop EngTregs for the treatment of autoimmune, alloimmune, autoinflammatory, and allergic diseases. Unlike other companies studying treatments using a patient’s own Tregs, GentiBio plans to make use of CD4+ immune cells, found in the blood.