Stealth Bio may be re­think­ing its low-pro­file ap­proach to an IPO.

The com­pa­ny just launched its ini­tial of­fer­ing, pric­ing 6.5 mil­lion shares for $MI­TO at $12 — the low end of the range — and rais­ing $78 mil­lion for its work on a pipeline of drugs fo­cused on mi­to­chon­dr­i­al dis­eases af­ter ap­ply­ing for an IPO in Hong Kong that nev­er ma­te­ri­al­ized. 

Morn­ing­side vet­er­an Ree­nie Mc­Carthy — a lawyer by train­ing — is in charge of the en­ter­prise while Mark Bam­berg­er, a for­mer car­dio and meta­bol­ic re­search chief at Pfiz­er, is CSO.

Ree­nie Mc­Carthy

The team at Stealth may have re­mained un­der the radar, but they’ve burned through $400 mil­lion work­ing on new ther­a­pies re­lat­ed to mi­to­chon­dr­i­al dys­func­tion. Mi­to­chon­dria are the pow­er­hous­es of the cell, turn­ing fu­el in­to en­er­gy. And when that goes wrong, it can spur a host of dis­eases, run­ning from rare ge­net­ic con­di­tions to broad is­sues re­lat­ed to ag­ing.

Mark Bam­berg­er

The biotech has a Phase III pro­gram all lined up and ready to read out lat­er in the year, look­ing for promis­ing da­ta on elamipre­tide on pri­ma­ry mi­to­chon­dr­i­al my­opa­thy. The biotech has 4 clin­i­cal pro­grams un­der­way, with the ear­li­est tar­get­ing dry, age-re­lat­ed mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion.

Morn­ing­side Ven­tures owned the li­on’s share of the eq­ui­ty go­ing in­to the IPO, with 95.3% of the stock.

Let the long battle for biosimilars in the cancer space begin.

Amgen has launched its Avastin and Herceptin copycats — licensed from the predecessors of Allergan — almost two years after the FDA had stamped its approval on Mvasi (bevacizumab-awwb) and three months after the Kanjinti OK (trastuzumab-anns). While the biotech had been fielding biosimilars in Europe, this marks their first foray in the US — and the first oncology biosimilars in the country.

→ On the same day it announced a $17.5 million Series C, life sciences and health data company Seer unveiled that it had lured former FDA commissioner and ex-CMS administrator Mark McClellan on to its board. “Mark’s deep understanding of the health care ecosystem and visionary insights on policy reform will be crucial in informing our thinking as we work to bring our liquid biopsy and life sciences products to market,” said Seer chief and founder Omid Farokhzad in a statement.

Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day’s new task hunting up a CSO for the company isn’t stopping the industry’s dominant antiviral player from doing pipeline deals.

The big biotech today snapped up 3 preclinical antiviral programs from pharma giant Novartis, with drugs promising to treat human rhinovirus, influenza and herpes viruses. We don’t know what the upfront is, but the back end has $291 million in milestones baked in.

Servier is walking out on a partnership with MacroGenics $MGNX — for the second time.

After the market closed on Wednesday MacroGenics put out word that Servier is severing a deal — inked close to 7 years ago — to collaborate on the development of flotetuzumab and other Dual-Affinity Re-Targeting (DART) drugs in its pipeline.

MacroGenics CEO Scott Koenig shrugged off the departure of Servier, which paid $20 million to kick off the alliance and $20 million to option flotetuzumab — putting a heavily back-ended $1 billion-plus in additional biobuck money on the table for the anti-CD123/CD3 bispecific and its companion therapies.