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An­oth­er day, an­oth­er SPAC vy­ing for a spot on Nas­daq.

On Wednes­day, On­coSec Med­ical CEO Daniel O’Con­nor filed the S-1 pa­per­work for a new blank-check com­pa­ny he’s lead­ing called Lark­spur Health Ac­qui­si­tion. The for­mer Ad­vax­is chief pen­ciled in a $75 mil­lion raise, with plans to of­fer 7.5 mil­lion shares at $10 apiece.

Daniel O’Con­nor

Ac­cord­ing to End­points News’ IPO track­er, 44 SPACs have filed for IPOs this year, rais­ing just shy of $14.5 bil­lion. It’s all part of a wave that car­ried over from 2020, which saw more than 30 health care-fo­cused SPACs go pub­lic. Blank check com­pa­nies, which ac­count­ed for on­ly 3% of the IPO mar­ket in 2014, rep­re­sent­ed more than 35% of last year’s mar­ket.

Gink­go Bioworks struck a record $2.5 bil­lion SPAC deal ear­li­er this week, an­nounc­ing plans to merge with Har­ry Sloan’s Soar­ing Ea­gle Ac­qui­si­tion Corp., which sets its pre-mon­ey val­u­a­tion at $15 bil­lion. Sci­ence 37 — a tech de­vel­op­er known for its work on de­cen­tral­ized clin­i­cal tri­als — al­so re­cent­ly an­nounced plans to go pub­lic on the back of a SPAC, strik­ing a deal to merge with LifeSci Ac­qui­si­tion II Corp., which raised just over $80 mil­lion in No­vem­ber.

Like most SPACs, Lark­spur is keep­ing the de­tails to a min­i­mum, on­ly re­veal­ing in the S-1 that it’s look­ing to merge with a com­pa­ny in the biotech in­dus­try.

“We have not se­lect­ed any spe­cif­ic busi­ness com­bi­na­tion tar­get and we have not, nor has any­one on our be­half, ini­ti­at­ed any sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sions, di­rect­ly or in­di­rect­ly, with any busi­ness com­bi­na­tion tar­get,” the doc­u­ment states.

O’Con­nor, a for­mer crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tor in Som­er­set Coun­ty, NJ, was CEO of Ad­vax­is be­fore leav­ing the com­pa­ny abrupt­ly — and with­out of­fer­ing a rea­son — in 2017. He’s now lead­ing On­coSec’s ef­forts to de­vel­op an IL-12 can­cer ther­a­py that’s ac­ti­vat­ed by elec­tro­po­ra­tion, or a se­ries of mo­men­tary en­er­gy puls­es. The biotech’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al ther­a­py Ta­vo is cur­rent­ly in a piv­otal tri­al in com­bi­na­tion with Keytru­da for ad­vanced melanoma.

The Senate won’t return from its summer recess until Sept. 6, but when it does, it officially has 18 business days to finalize the reauthorization of the FDA user fee programs for the next 5 years, or else thousands of drug and biologics reviewers will be laid off and PDUFA dates will vanish in the interim.

FDA commissioner Rob Califf recently sent agency staff a memo explaining how, “Our latest estimates are that we have carryover for PDUFA [Prescription Drug User Fee Act], the user fee funding program that will run out of funding first, to cover only about 5 weeks into the next fiscal year.”

Regulators didn’t keep AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo waiting long at all for their latest Enhertu approval.

The partners pulled a win on Friday in HER2-low breast cancer patients who’ve already failed on chemotherapy, just two weeks after submitting a supplemental BLA. While this isn’t the FDA’s fastest approval — Bristol Myers Squibb won an OK for its blockbuster checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo in just five days back in March — it comes well ahead of Enhertu’s original Q4 PDUFA date.

Rare diseases often have more than just physical effects on patients — especially when it comes to chronic conditions. In the case of the rare slow-growing blood cancer chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), AbbVie wanted to try to assess the mental and emotional toll on patients.

So it surveyed more than 300 CLL patients, caregivers and physicians. While each group differed in how they felt — caregivers overwhelmingly (81%) felt positive about their role, for instance — patients described a “roller coaster” of emotions traversing diagnosis to treatment to remission and even relapse for some.