That oth­er mes­sen­ger RNA biotech uni­corn is look­ing to jump in­to Wall Street with an IPO that may seek a record $800 mil­lion and a val­u­a­tion of some $4 bil­lion.

Ugur Sahin, CEO, BioN­Tech

Bankers are buzzing that Bank of Amer­i­ca and JP Mor­gan have al­ready been tapped for the IPO on be­half of BioN­Tech, a Ger­man biotech that has at­tract­ed con­sid­er­able at­ten­tion for its role as a leader in the mR­NA field, ac­cord­ing to a re­port in Reuters.

Some­thing is bound to be go­ing on here. Reuters’ re­port comes a few weeks af­ter Bloomberg pub­lished a piece on the prospec­tive IPO for BioN­Tech, cit­ing a pos­si­ble val­u­a­tion of $5 bil­lion.

Mod­er­na blazed the IPO $MR­NA path for mR­NA a lit­tle more than 3 months ago, rais­ing $604 mil­lion in a his­toric of­fer­ing that quick­ly soured as its stock blew south. But that was just tem­po­rary. The stock lat­er climbed back up and now sits at $19.75 with a $6.5 bil­lion mar­ket cap.

Ear­ly this year Sanofi dou­bled down on its al­liance with the biotech, fronting an ex­pand­ed pact with $91 mil­lion in cash for im­munother­a­pies de­signed to go af­ter sol­id tu­mors. Ear­li­er Pfiz­er lined up a siz­able deal to de­vel­op an mR­NA flu vac­cine, of­fer­ing cash for an up­front and eq­ui­ty. And a lit­tle more than a year ago BioN­Tech came up with a $270 mil­lion round, bring­ing its to­tal raise at the time to close to $1 bil­lion.

The ini­tial seed mon­ey was of­fered by the bil­lion­aire Strüng­mann broth­ers, who are the ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­ers.

The IPO win­dow re­mains open for biotechs, but af­ter a big string of new of­fer­ings in 2018, the gen­er­al con­sen­sus is that there will be a de­cline in the num­ber of com­pa­nies mak­ing the leap on­to the pub­lic stage.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

It’s been a busy fall on Wall Street — and this week, we’ve got another biotech going public after Ventyx yesterday.

Massachusetts solid-tumor biotech Xilio Therapeutics made its public debut today, joining 149 other biotechs that have gone public so far this year.

Back on October 1st, Xilio filed its S-1 with the SEC to make its IPO debut for $100 million — the next step in financing after completing a $95 million Series C back in February.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.