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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.

In the insular world of biotech, a spectacular failure can sometimes stay on any executive’s record for a long time. But for David Meek, the man at the helm of FerGene’s recent implosion, two questionable exits made way for what could be an excellent rebound.

Meek, most recently FerGene’s CEO and a past head at Ipsen, has become CEO at Mirati Therapeutics, taking the reins from founding CEO Charles Baum, who will step over into the role of president and head of R&D, according to a release.

Biopharma’s resident antibody-drug conjugate expert Seagen has scored a clutch of oncology approvals in recent years, finding gold in what are known as “third-gen” ADCs. Now, another of their partnered conjugates is ready for prime time.

The FDA on Monday handed an accelerated approval to Seagen and Genmab’s Tivdak (tisotumab vedotin-tftv, or “TV”) in second-line patients with recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer who previously progressed after chemotherapy rather than PD-(L)1 systemic therapy, the companies said in a release.

For a first-time fund, Jeito Capital talks a lot about continuity.

Rafaèle Tordjman had spotlighted that concept ever since she started building the firm in 2018, promising to go the extra mile(s) with biotech entrepreneurs while pushing them to reach patients faster.

Coincidentally, the lack of continuity was one of the sore spots listed in a report about the European healthcare sector published that same year by the European Investment Bank — whose fund is one of the LPs, alongside the American pension fund Teacher Retirement System of Texas and Singapore’s Temasek, to help Jeito close its first fund at $630 million (€534 million). As previously reported, Sanofi had chimed in €50 million, marking its first investment in a French life sciences fund.

Illumina Ventures closed off its second investment fund with a total commitment of $325 million, offering fresh fuel to back a slate of startups that have already included a smorgasbord of companies, covering everything from diagnostics to biotech drug development and genomics.

Fund II brings the total investment under Illumina Ventures’ oversight to $560 million, which has been focused on early-stage companies. And it has a transatlantic portfolio that includes SQZ, Twist and Encoded Therapeutics.

Several months after emerging from what CEO Raju Mohan called “quiet mode” with a mammoth $114 million raise, Ventyx Biosciences is now making its plans for the clinic loud and clear.

The California-based immune modulation player kicked the week off with a $51 million Series B, while also naming some key hires ahead of its big clinical push.

The CMO slot is going to Jörn Drappa, former CMO at Viela Bio before it was bought out by Horizon Therapeutics earlier this year. The AstraZeneca vet stayed on at Horizon for a while as executive VP of R&D before making the jump to Ventyx.