A week af­ter up­dat­ing their S-1 in search of at least $115 mil­lion on the hot biotech IPO mar­ket, Po­sei­da Ther­a­peu­tics says it’s al­so raised a fresh ven­ture round — a lit­tle more than a year af­ter its last.

The first time around, af­ter Po­sei­da de­layed its IPO dur­ing a gov­ern­ment shut­down, the biotech re­port­ed a $150 mil­lion C round. This time around, it’s adding $110 mil­lion more from Fi­deli­ty Man­age­ment Re­search Com­pa­ny and oth­ers.

There’s no word in the biotech’s state­ment on No­var­tis, which bought up half of the eq­ui­ty for the Se­ries C cash with a $75 mil­lion in­vest­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to the SEC fil­ing, No­var­tis — which field­ed the first, some­what trou­bled CAR-T — owns 14.9% of the com­pa­ny, with Ma­lin in for 23.2%, though those num­bers may have changed now.

The big ben­e­fi­cia­ry is CEO Er­ic Os­tertag, who con­trols 12.6 mil­lion shares — 25.4% — through var­i­ous fam­i­ly trusts.

Po­sei­da’s big idea in­volves the use of a non-vi­ral DNA tech that they say can be used to gath­er a big­ger con­cen­tra­tion of stem cell mem­o­ry T cells that can avoid the ex­haus­tion that lim­its the ef­fi­ca­cy of the pi­o­neers — a cen­tral theme in cell ther­a­py 2.0.

Os­tertag picked up his PhD in mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­o­gy at Penn and went on to a ca­reer that in­clud­ed a va­ri­ety of biotech star­tups.

Years after selling Acerta to AstraZeneca for $7 billion, largely on the promise of its BTK inhibitor, Dave Johnson has once again gathered hefty financial support behind a new cancer target.

Matrix Capital Management and Surveyor Capital are leading a $137 million round for VelosBio, which has recently begun a Phase I study for its lead antibody-drug conjugate targeted against ROR1. Johnson took up the CEO post in October 2018.

Portola may not have had much success proving the commercial value of an anti-anticoagulant, but that’s not stopping European investors from pouring $36.2 million (€32 million) into what they see as a superior approach put forth by a Dutch biotech.

VarmX’s blood thinner reversal agent stems from research done by founder and CSO Pieter Reitsma at Leiden University Medical Center. A modified recombinant form of factor X, VMX-C001 “has an insertion of 16 amino acids that replaces a stretch of 7 amino acids in the so-called serine protease domain” compared to the native coagulation factor, CEO Alexander Vos told Endpoints News.

→ Zai Lab is paying out a $25 million upfront for the rights to sell Turning Point Therapeutics’ lead drug repotrectinib in Greater China. The San Diego-based biotech is also in line for up to $151 million in milestones, along with mid-to-high teen royalties. Zai plans to add sites to the Phase II trial of the drug, which is designed to treat ROS1-positive advanced NSCLC in patients who were not previously treated with a TKI.

Concert Pharmaceuticals’ path to developing a drug that treats alopecia areata has been bumpy, but the pharma company scored a win Wednesday.

The FDA granted Concert a Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) for its oral Janus kinase inhibitor, named CTP-543, paving the way for a Phase III study of the drug to begin in the fourth quarter of 2020. The news follows positive Phase II results from last September, which saw the drug meet its primary endpoint in both 8 mg and 12 mg twice-daily doses.

The Phase III might be delayed from its original early July goal, but Moderna says it will still kick off the pivotal study for what could ultimately be the first Covid-19 vaccine before the end of the month.

A day after Reuters reported that squabbling between the Cambridge biotech and government regulators had held up the trial by about two weeks, Moderna released a statement saying that they had completed enrollment of their 650-person Phase II trial and were on track to begin Phase III by the end of the month. The protocol for that study, which is meant to prove whether or not the vaccine can prevent people from becoming sick, has been finalized, they said.

Two years after it first emerged from stealth mode, Flagship’s Foghorn Therapeutics has nabbed its first Big Pharma partner as Merck signs on to the biotech’s vision of drugging the very shape of DNA.

The deal, worth up to $425 million but with the upfront cash undisclosed, comes as Foghorn nears a pivot to a clinical stage biotech. The Cambridge-based company has added nearly 60 staffers from the 25 it had when it first emerged out of Flagship and, CEO Adrian Gottschalk said, they have finally refined the screening technology at the heart of the company, with plans to file their first IND towards the end of the year.