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.

Earlier this year, an executive from Juvenescence-backed AgeX predicted the field of longevity will eventually “dwarf the dotcom boom.” Greg Bailey, the UK-based anti-aging biotech’s CEO, certainly hopes so.

On Monday, Juvenescence completed its $100 million Series B round of financing. The company is backed by British billionaire Jim Mellon — who wrote his 400-page guide to investing in the field of longevity shortly after launching the company in 2017.  Bailey, who served as a board director for seven years at Medivation before Pfizer swallowed the biotech for $14 billion, is joined by Declan Doogan, an industry veteran with stints at Pfizer and Amarin.

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.

After a “hot” period of rapid growth between 2009 and 2012, and a relatively “cooler” period of slower growth from 2013 to 2015, China has once again become a top-of-mind priority for the CEOs of most large, multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At the International Pharma Forum, hosted in March in Beijing by the R&D Based Pharmaceutical Association Committee (RDPAC) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), no fewer than seven CEOs of major multinational pharmaceutical firms participated, including GSK, Eli Lilly, LEO Pharma, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB. A few days earlier, the CEOs of several other large multinationals attended the China Development Forum, an annual business forum hosted by the research arm of China’s State Council. It’s hard to imagine any other country, except the US, having such drawing power at CEO level.