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The bur­geon­ing field of pro­teomics has court­ed heavy in­vest­ment over the last few years, and on Mon­day a promi­nent pro­teomics biotech scored a new heap­ing of cap­i­tal.

So­ma­Log­ic an­nounced plans to re­verse-merge with Eli Cas­din and Kei­th Meis­ter’s sec­ond SPAC on Mon­day, dubbed CM Life Sci­ences II, fetch­ing the com­pa­ny a $1.23 bil­lion val­u­a­tion. The deal gives So­ma­Log­ic a cash in­fu­sion of $276 mil­lion from the SPAC’s IPO last month, as well as a pri­vate in­vest­ment of $375 mil­lion from a syn­di­cate of new and re­turn­ing in­vestors.

Once the merg­er clos­es some­time in the third quar­ter, the com­bined com­pa­ny will trade on the tick­er $SLGC.

Cas­din and Meis­ter had teamed up last sum­mer for their first blank check com­pa­ny, rais­ing what was then a mas­sive $385 mil­lion be­fore the SPAC flood­gates opened this year. Meis­ter, who is him­self a Carl Ic­ahn pro­tégé once viewed as the bil­lion­aire’s right-hand man, launched the SPAC in Au­gust 2020 and teamed up with Cas­din and his bio­phar­ma team.

The cash to­tal swelled to $443 mil­lion when the shell com­pa­ny an­nounced its in­tent to merge with Se­ma4 in Feb­ru­ary, giv­ing the J&J and Sanofi-part­nered pa­tient da­ta, test­ing and ge­nomics plat­form a $2 bil­lion val­u­a­tion. It was one of the largest life sci­ences SPAC deals to date as cash con­tin­ues to flow al­most un­fet­tered in­to SPACs.

Now the duo is back at it again with Mon­day’s So­ma­Log­ic agree­ment, bring­ing the Boul­der, CO-based biotech to Nas­daq. It’s one of a num­ber of biotechs look­ing to un­der­stand the hu­man body by look­ing at pro­teins, rather than DNA and RNA, and the deal comes just three months af­ter the com­pa­ny’s Se­ries A ex­ten­sion.

So­ma­Log­ic CEO Roy Smythe told End­points News that the “con­text” of the mar­ket helped fu­el their de­ci­sion to go pub­lic short­ly af­ter last year’s fundraise.

“We in­tend­ed on some time­line af­ter that Se­ries A to con­tem­plate a pub­lic tran­si­tion to think about when to do that,” Smythe told End­points. “We had been talk­ing about mak­ing a de­ci­sion pri­or to this, and the SPAC has some ad­van­tages de­pend­ing on your per­spec­tive as a com­pa­ny.”

With the merg­er, So­ma­Log­ic can now “dou­ble down” on its strat­e­gy of both col­lect­ing pro­teom­ic da­ta and cre­at­ing ap­pli­ca­tions for clin­i­cal tri­als us­ing that da­ta, Smythe added. The com­pa­ny says it has a to­tal of 20 val­i­dat­ed test­ing tools, known as So­maSig­nal, with an­oth­er 100 or so in de­vel­op­ment.

SPACs have trig­gered what’s be­come a gold rush on Wall Street, with more than $170 bil­lion poured in­to the hold­ing com­pa­nies so far this year. That’s al­ready eclipsed the fig­ure from all of 2020, Reuters re­port­ed last week, which hit $157 bil­lion.

That rush has on­ly brought in more mon­ey with a myr­i­ad of in­vestors try­ing to cap­i­tal­ize. There was the high-pro­file Richard Bran­son SPAC that merged with 23andMe in Feb­ru­ary, and Fore­site and Per­cep­tive, among oth­ers, have launched new blank check com­pa­nies in re­cent months.

The So­ma­Log­ic merg­er al­so comes short­ly af­ter the SEC opened an in­quiry in­to how Wall Street banks are man­ag­ing their risks in the blank check deals, ask­ing fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to vol­un­tar­i­ly pro­vide in­for­ma­tion about how they’re in­ter­nal­ly polic­ing SPACs.

Gilead recently decided to pull two indications for its cancer drug Zydelig — in relapsed follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (FL) and relapsed small lymphocytic leukemia (SLL) — after failing to complete the confirmatory trials required as part of the accelerated approvals from 2014.

“As the treatment landscape for FL and SLL has evolved, enrollment into the confirmatory study has been an ongoing challenge,” Gilead said in a statement, noting it formally notified the FDA of its decision to voluntarily withdraw these indications.