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.

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

Francesco De Rubertis made no secret of IPO plans for Centessa, his 10-in-1 legacy play. Barely two months later, the S-1 is in.

The hot-off-the-press filing depicts the same grand vision that the longtime VC touted when he did the rounds in February: Take the asset-centric mindset that he’s been preaching at Medicxi over the years, and roll up a bunch of biotech upstarts, with unrelated risk profiles, into 1 pharma company that can carry on the development at scale.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”

The world of radiopharmaceuticals has been heating up over the last few years, and Thursday saw another company focused on the field pull in a new nine-figure raise.

Germany’s ITM, or Isotopen Technologien München, scored a $109 million round of loan financing to push forward its precision oncology pipeline and fund late-stage development for its lead program. As part of the agreement, the loan will convert to shares in the event of future financial or corporate transactions, ITM said.