The sea­soned crew at Ja­co­bio has raised $174.1 mil­lion on its HKEX de­but, fu­elling a pipeline an­chored by two Ab­b­Vie-part­nered al­losteric SHP2 in­hibitors.

It’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than what the biotech was ru­mored to be seek­ing back in Au­gust — Bloomberg’s sources said it could be as much as $400 mil­lion — but Qim­ing, which has backed the biotech since its Se­ries A, was hap­py about how it went from found­ing to IPO in just five years. At 12.34%, Qim­ing owned the largest chunk of stock in Ja­co­bio.

Yinx­i­ang Wang

Ja­co­bio has po­si­tioned it­self firm­ly with­in an emerg­ing group of Chi­nese up­starts with the lofty am­bi­tion to on­ly de­vel­op in-house drugs that are first-in-class across the globe. That means no in-li­cens­ing and no me-too or me-bet­ter prod­ucts — the two strate­gies that many of its bet­ter-known coun­ter­parts were built on.

The top team com­pris­es CEO Yinx­i­ang Wang, R&D chief Shao­jing Hu and pres­i­dent of ad­min­is­tra­tion Jiessie Wang. The trio worked to­geth­er at Bet­ta Phar­ma, a Shen­zhen-list­ed biotech that de­vel­oped and now mar­kets an epi­der­mal growth fac­tor re­cep­tor in­hibitor called ico­tinib.

Like much of the in­dus­try, though, can­cer and au­toim­mune dis­ease loom large in the port­fo­lio, with an ad­di­tion­al fo­cus on in­fec­tious dis­eases. To full flesh out the treat­ments, Ja­co­bio has set up a sub­sidiary and a joint ven­ture.

Aside from the SHP2 drugs, there’s al­so JAB-3068, which in­hibits an en­zyme be­lieved to play a role in sev­er­al blood can­cers called PTPN11. The idea is that it can work down­stream for PD-1 check­points and lift im­muno­sup­pres­sion in the tu­mor mi­croen­vi­ron­ment.

Oth­er in­vestors in­clude Hill­house, Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures and Tai­wan’s Cen­ter Lab­o­ra­to­ries.

As Congress considers whether to adopt sweeping new legislation to lower prescription drug prices across the board, the Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a new report on Monday showing how a more targeted approach on a subset of drugs might be a more efficient way to save government funds.

“This analysis shows that Medicare Part D and Part B spending is highly concentrated among a relatively small share of covered drugs, mainly those without generic or biosimilar competitors,” wrote Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, and Tricia Neuman, SVP of KFF. “Focusing drug price negotiation or reference pricing on a subset of drugs that account for a disproportionate share of spending would be an efficient use of administrative resources, though it would also leave some potential savings on the table.”

Editor’s note: Interested in following biopharma’s fast-paced IPO market? You can bookmark our IPO Tracker here.

It was another busy week in the biotech IPO market as the second quarter continues to churn out significant investment into the sector.

Recursion led the way with a $436 million raise on Friday, pricing its IPO at $18, the high end of its range. Our own John Carroll went in depth on that raise over the weekend. Also on Friday, preclinical cancer biotech Biomea Fusion debuted with a $153 million raise priced at its own high end of $17 per share. The two companies helped push the combined IPO raise for 2021 to nearly $5.5 billion.

It’s always a surprise when a court has to step in to tell the FDA that it erred in performing one of its main duties: classifying whether a medical product is drug or a device.

But that’s what the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did on Friday, making clear to the world’s top drug regulator that Genus Medical Technologies’ contrast agent barium sulfate (also known as Vanilla SilQ) should not be considered a drug, as the FDA had said, but a medical device.

Seagen is riding the wave of two new priority reviews straight to the FDA.

The Bothell, WA-based biotech and their partners at Astellas announced Monday that two supplemental BLAs for Padcev had been accepted by US regulators. FDA has set Aug. 17 as the PDUFA date for the reviews.

“With our recent regulatory submissions, we intend to provide the highest level of clinical evidence supporting Padcev use — overall survival data from a randomized Phase III trial — and expand availability in multiple countries where there is unmet medical need,” said Astellas oncology chief Andrew Krivoshik.