An­oth­er blank check com­pa­ny has filed to ride the biotech IPO wave, which shows no sign of crash­ing any­time soon.

Turmer­ic Ac­qui­si­tion, a spe­cial pur­pose ac­qui­si­tion com­pa­ny formed by Boston-based MPM Cap­i­tal, an­nounced on Mon­day that it’s look­ing for a $100 mil­lion raise. It will be one of sev­er­al to hit Nas­daq in a his­toric year for SPACs. It’s not clear which biotechs are in Tumer­ic’s sights — but it says it’s go­ing af­ter in­no­v­a­tive com­pa­nies with “new modal­i­ties”.

“For many years, drug de­vel­op­ment in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and biotech in­dus­tries has been dom­i­nat­ed by two modal­i­ties: small mol­e­cules and pro­tein bi­o­log­ics (such as an­ti­bod­ies). How­ev­er, in re­cent years, new modal­i­ties have emerged with land­mark ap­provals by the US FDA and the Eu­ro­pean Med­i­cines Agency. These new modal­i­ties in­clude cell ther­a­pies, gene ther­a­pies, and nu­cle­ic acid ther­a­pies, in­clud­ing RNA ther­a­pies […] We be­lieve New Modal­i­ties have the po­ten­tial to in­crease the rate of in­no­va­tion and trans­la­tion of sci­ence in­to trans­for­ma­tive ther­a­pies,” Tumer­ic’s S-1 fil­ing states.

Back in 2014, SPACs were 3% of the IPO mar­ket. In Ju­ly, Nas­daq’s head of cap­i­tal mar­kets Jay Heller told End­points News they were al­most 35% of all new list­ings. Last week, it was 5:01 Ac­qui­si­tion — a 5AM Ven­tures-backed blank check com­pa­ny — fil­ing to go pub­lic, seek­ing an $80 mil­lion raise.

More than 50 biotechs have filed for IPOs this year, Nas­daq head of health­care list­ings Jor­dan Saxe told End­points last week. On Fri­day, 56 biotechs had raised $11.3 bil­lion. Saxe made a low-end es­ti­mate that there will be 65-70 biotech IPOs by the end of the year.

Following a massive public raise last November, Kodiak Sciences has re-worked a royalty sale agreement with an old partner — and declined new funds in the process.

Kodiak is turning down a planned $125 million payment from Baker Bros. Advisors, according to an SEC filing, cutting short an agreement that saw the biotech hand over a 4.5% stream of royalty sales on its experimental anti-VEGF therapy KSI-301 for retinal vascular diseases. In conjunction with the move, Kodiak is shrinking the royalty cap from just over $1 billion to $450 million.

The European Medicines Agency on Friday rejected Kyowa Kirin’s Parkinson’s disease drug Nouryant (istradefylline), which the US FDA approved in 2019 under the brand name Nourianz.

EMA said it considered that the results of the clinical studies used to support the application “were inconsistent and did not satisfactorily show that Nouryant was effective at reducing the ‘off’ time. Only four out of the eight studies showed a reduction in ‘off’ time, and the effect did not increase with an increased dose of Nouryant.”