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.

Six years ago, a band of neuroscientists from the University of California, San Francisco combined decades of research and jumped into the hunt for an off-the-shelf cell therapy. Now, that team is sprinting toward the clinic with a treatment for epilepsy — but first, it’s making a pit stop at the venture well.

Neurona Therapeutics unveiled a $41.5 million round on Tuesday morning, bringing the San Francisco-based biotech’s total raise to $135 million. The cash will be used to advance the company’s pipeline, including an upcoming Phase I/IIa for its lead candidate, NRTX-1001, in chronic focal epilepsy.

One of the earliest employees at AI biotech Recursion Pharmaceuticals is leading a new company, and he’s just closed a hefty Series A to get things moving.

Enveda Biosciences pulled in $51 million in the raise, the company announced Tuesday morning, with the goal of pushing some of its preclinical programs further along. Led by CEO Viswa Colluru, Enveda aims to research how machine learning can utilize natural biology to create new therapies for Wilson’s Disease, NASH and Parkinson’s disease, among others.

As the Biden administration tries to wrangle the details of its infrastructure bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) took a concrete step forward on drug pricing reforms on Tuesday and unveiled five principles for such reforms, including providing Medicare with the ability to negotiate prices.

“Allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate the price Medicare will pay creates a much needed mechanism to achieve fairer prices when the market has failed to do so,” Wyden wrote.

More than a year ago, Roche and Eli Lilly were forced to contend with a Phase II/III failure of their respective Alzheimer’s drugs. But while Eli Lilly essentially threw in the towels, Roche wasn’t ready to give up yet.

The Swiss drugmaker now has some biomarker data to spotlight as investigators continue monitoring patients in an open-label extension study.

Dubbed DIAN-TU, the study had been designed to see whether Roche’s gantenerumab and Lilly’s solanezumab could spur a cognitive benefit for a group of patients who had a rare, inherited form of Alzheimer’s that’d tied to early-onset. In short, they didn’t: Both failed the primary endpoint.

Endpoints News turned five years old over the weekend. I wanted to mark the happy occasion by extending our deepest gratitude to Endpoints’ premium subscribers while outlining several other ways to support us as we go broader and get bigger this year and beyond.

Same as any business, we’ve got to create value and get paid for delivering it. So if you depend on Endpoints to stay abreast on biopharma developments, we depend on you too.