Ed­i­tor’s note: In­ter­est­ed in fol­low­ing bio­phar­ma’s fast-paced IPO mar­ket? You can book­mark our IPO Track­er here.

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.

Harith Rajagopalan compared the way type 2 diabetes is managed to sticking your fingers in a dam that’s leaking from a number of places.

You can take drugs to lower your blood sugar, cholesterol, or blood pressure, but you’re not addressing what he says is the core issue — the metabolic abnormality that causes the disease.

“We’re so busy plugging the holes in the dam, we don’t have time to see that the whole infrastructure is at risk,” he said. “That infrastructure is a full-body systemic metabolic abnormality called metabolic syndrome, that we’re ignoring while we’re so busy trying to treat all of the individual symptoms of the condition.”

Editor’s note: Interested in following biopharma’s fast-paced IPO market? You can bookmark our IPO Tracker here.

A flurry of biotechs are expected to hit Nasdaq this week, with two companies, Ambrx Biopharma and Century Therapeutics, setting the terms for their public debuts, with expected raises at $126 million and $200 million, respectively. Alzamend Neuro is also joining in with a $12.5 million raise and two preclinical Alzheimer’s treatments in tow.

Forbion laid out its case for a next-generation gene therapy approach when it took the wraps off VectorY Therapeutics and its vectorized antibody tech in February. Now, the Dutch VC has tapped an experienced hand at cell and gene therapy manufacturing to steer the ship — and pulled a marquee syndicate for a €31 million ($37.6 million) seed round.

Alexander Vos, the new CEO, is a venture partner at BioGeneration Ventures and jumps immediately from VarmX, a BGV portfolio company developing an anticoagulant. But before that, he had led Dutch CDMO PharmaCell for eight years until it was bought out by Lonza.