A low-profile small interfering RNA player has managed to squeeze in its IPO before the year ends, adding another listing to the Hong Kong stock exchange’s tally.

Sirnaomics is making its HKEX debut with a modest raise of slightly over $50 million, with the potential of adding about $10 million if the over-allotment option is exercised in full.

CEO Patrick Lu founded the biotech all the way back in 2007, setting up an early discovery operation in Gaithersburg, MD after a transition from research at Georgetown into industry — first working for Novartis then co-founding another company called Intradigm. Through it all, he was focused on what he calls nucleic acid drug development.

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The FDA’s intensifying scrutiny on accelerated approvals isn’t just putting pressure on drugmakers with marketed products. It is also subtly reshaping the regulatory dynamics.

Case in point: Incyte announced late Tuesday that it has made the “business decision” to withdraw an NDA for parsaclisib, its oral PI3Kδ inhibitor, after deciding that running the confirmatory studies the agency was asking for to support an accelerated approval wouldn’t be worth it.

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Gilead’s $5 billion drug magrolimab has run into a serious setback.

The FDA ordered Gilead to halt enrollment on their studies of the drug in combination with azacitidine after investigators reports revealed an “apparent imbalance” in the suspected unexpected serious adverse reactions between study arms. And the halt is raising questions about Gilead’s plans for a quick pitch to regulators.

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Of the countless decisions Vlad Coric had to make as Biohaven’s CEO over the past seven years, there was one that felt particularly nerve-wracking: Instead of selling to a Big Pharma, the company decided it would commercialize its migraine drug itself.

“I remember some investors yelling and pounding on the table like, you can’t do this. What are you thinking? You’re going to get crushed by AbbVie,” he recalled.

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Pfizer debuted its first TV ad for its Prevnar 20 next-generation pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine. In the 60-second spot, several people (actor portrayals) with their ages listed as 65 or older are shown walking into a clinic as they turn to say they’re getting vaccinated with Prevnar 20 because they’re at risk.

The update to Pfizer’s blockbuster Prevnar 13 vaccine was approved in June, and as its name suggests is a vaccine for 20 serotypes — the original 13 plus seven more that cause pneumococcal disease. Pfizer used to spend heavily on TV ads to promote Prevnar 13 in 2018 and 2019 but cut back its TV budgets in the past two fall and winter seasonal spending cycles. Prevnar had been Pfizer’s top-selling drug, notching sales of just under $6 billion in 2020, and was the world’s top-selling vaccine before the Covid-19 vaccines came to market last year.

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Despite some heavy blowback from analysts, Merck execs maintained an upbeat attitude about the market potential of its chronic cough drug gefapixant. But the confidence may be fading somewhat today as Merck puts out news that the FDA is handing back its application with a CRL.

Dubbed by Merck’s development chief Roy Baynes as a “pipeline in a product” with a variety of potential uses, Merck had fielded positive late-stage data demonstrating the drug’s ability to combat chronic cough. The drug dramatically reduced chronic cough in Phase III, but so did placebo, leaving Merck’s research team with a marginal success on the p-value side of the equation.

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The big bucks keep pumping into the gene-editing field.

This morning Metagenomi, allied with one of the biggest names in the mRNA field with a company DNA that includes the ubiquitous Jennifer Doudna, is showing off a $175 million B round that will pay for a rapid swelling of its staff in pursuit of some of the cutting-edge tech that keeps this field in the spotlight. And they’re aligning themselves with some major industry players with an eye on the clinic while getting behind some startups to help expand the work into new fields.

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In about 17 months, Fluidigm has gone from working with sharks to Vikings.

The South San Francisco-based company, which landed NIH money in a Shark Tank-style program for Covid-19 testing, announced that it will take on an investment worth $250 million from Casdin Capital and Viking Global Investors. It will also rebrand, and call itself Standard BioTools. The investment will help the company focus on the highest growth areas of discovery and development and expand its CRO and CMO service providers. Right now, the company’s customer reach is limited to basic research, it said.

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