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.

A red-hot venture market back in 2018 propelled Relay Therapeutics to a whopping $400 million crossover round. And now, the biotech is riding on a red-hot IPO market to a public debut that brought in the same exact amount.

The $400 million raise breaks down to 20 million shares sold at $20 each — above even the amended proposed range of $16 to $18.

It’s also double what Relay had penciled in with the initial S-1 filing, in yet another illustration that those figures are often nothing more than a placeholder these days.

One of the many inequalities the pandemic has laid bare is the gender imbalance in biomedical research. A paper examining Covid-19 research authorship wondered out loud: Where are the women?

It’s a question that echoes beyond our current times. In the biopharma world, not only are women under-represented in R&D roles (particularly at higher levels), their achievements and talents could also be undermined by stereotypes and norms of leadership styles. The problem is even more dire for women of color.

A little over a year after agreeing to a worldwide collaboration with hefty Chinese biotech BeiGene worth up to $270 million, BioAtla is ready for another haul.

The San Diego-based biotech pulled in a $72.5 million haul for their Series D financing, which the company announced Wednesday. Funds will go toward their four main clinical programs developing cancer treatments, two of which are currently in Phase II, BioAtla president and former Celgene COO Scott Smith said.

A day after Moderna and the NIH published much-anticipated data from their Phase I Covid-19 vaccine trial, attention is turning to AstraZeneca which, according to a UK report, is expected to publish its own early data tomorrow.

ITV’s Robert Peston reported that AstraZeneca will publish the Phase I data in The Lancet. 

AstraZeneca and Moderna represent the two most ambitious Covid-19 vaccine efforts, having set the quickest timelines for approval (though they were recently joined in that regard by the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership) and some of the loftiest goals in total doses. Yet there is even less known about AstraZeneca’s vaccine’s effect on humans than there was about Moderna’s before yesterday. Although, in a controversial move, Moderna released some statistics from its Phase I in May, AstraZeneca has yet to say anything about what it saw in its Phase I trial — a move consistent with the scientific convention to withhold data until it can be published in a peer-reviewed journal.