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.

Zoom can only go so far. And I think at this stage, we’ve all tested the limits of staying in touch — virtually. So I’m particularly happy now that we’ve revved up the travel machine to point myself to London for the first time in several years.

Whatever events we have lined up, we’ve always built in plenty of opportunities for all of us to get together and talk. For London, live, I plan to be right out front, meeting with and chatting with the small crowd of biopharma people we are hosting on October 12 at Silicon Valley Bank’s London headquarters. And there’s a lengthy mixer at the end I’m most looking forward to, with several networking openings between sessions.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024, but the entire inventory will be available until depleted or expired, a company spokesperson said via email.

Valneva has secured €102.9 million (around $99.9 million USD) in a share offering to push forward its Pfizer-partnered Lyme disease vaccine and a jab for chikungunya that awaits an FDA decision.

The French vaccine maker largely snagged the near $100 million from Deep Track Capital and local state-owned Bpifrance, the company said Tuesday night. The capital injection is nearly equal to the amount Pfizer paid to nab equity in the company earlier this summer as part of the duo’s vaccine tie-up.

Carolyn Bertozzi, predicted by some to become a Nobel laureate, clinched one of the world’s top awards in the wee hours of Wednesday, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside a repeat winner and a Copenhagen researcher.

The Stanford professor, Morten Meldal of University of Copenhagen and 2001-awardee K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps shared the prize equally. The Nobel is sometimes split in quarters and/or halves.