It’s a tough mar­ket right now for biotech IPOs, but one small com­pa­ny is tak­ing the pub­lic leap Fri­day with a mod­est ini­tial of­fer­ing.

Blue Wa­ter Vac­cines raised $20 mil­lion in its IPO, pric­ing shares at $9 apiece late Thurs­day af­ter­noon. The Cincin­nati-based com­pa­ny will use the mon­ey pri­mar­i­ly to ad­vance a slate of pre­clin­i­cal pro­grams to­ward IND stud­ies and boost man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties, it re­port­ed in its S-1 fil­ing.

When Blue Wa­ter de­buts Fri­day on Nas­daq, it will trade un­der the tick­er $BWV.

Long gone are the days of 2020 when the biotech IPO mar­ket was boom­ing, a pe­ri­od that stretched well in­to the first half of 2021 and saw rough­ly 200 com­pa­nies go pub­lic. The bull mar­ket helped bring in about $30 bil­lion in new cash, as in­vestors set their sights on the life sci­ences hop­ing to find the next pan­dem­ic suc­cess like Mod­er­na.

Dur­ing that pe­ri­od, it was not un­com­mon to see three or four biotechs price their IPOs every week. Some were so busy that 10 biotechs de­buted in a sin­gle week last Feb­ru­ary, and rais­es top­ping the $200 mil­lion mark were aplen­ty.

How­ev­er, the sec­tor has come down from that high in a stark fash­ion, as the biotech XBI has shaved more than 40% from that Feb­ru­ary 2021 peak. And al­ready this year, the fig­ure lost 20% of val­ue in Jan­u­ary alone, though it has sta­bi­lized around that lev­el so far this month.

The shift has led some to spec­u­late that VCs were per­haps overea­ger in push­ing their in­vest­ments pub­lic to cap­i­tal­ize on the boom­ing mar­ket, even if many such biotechs had not yet reached the clin­ic. RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, a no­table pres­ence in the crossover space, shep­herd­ed sev­er­al such biotechs to Nas­daq dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Two no­table ex­am­ples, Janux Ther­a­peu­tics and Tyra Bio­sciences, are each down 35% from their IPO prices last June and Sep­tem­ber, re­spec­tive­ly.

And at least one biotech, con­cerned over the ever-ethe­re­al “mar­ket con­di­tions,” elect­ed to go af­ter an­oth­er pri­vate megaround rather than jump to Nas­daq ear­li­er this week. It re­mains to be seen if oth­er com­pa­nies will fol­low Kally­ope’s lead, but the ram­i­fi­ca­tions could be felt through­out the sec­tor.

With Blue Wa­ter seem­ing­ly buck­ing the trend Fri­day, mi­cro­cap IPOs may end up able to weath­er the storm giv­en the low­er mar­ket ex­pec­ta­tions. The biotech priced at the mid­point of its range and of­fered 2.2 mil­lion shares.

Like many of its new­ly pub­lic coun­ter­parts, Blue Wa­ter does not have any pro­grams in the clin­ic just yet. It’s de­vel­op­ing sev­er­al dif­fer­ent vac­cine can­di­dates rang­ing from a uni­ver­sal flu shot to a stand­alone, long-last­ing H1 flu shot. The com­pa­ny is al­so re­search­ing a norovirus/ro­tavirus vac­cine, a norovirus/malar­ia vac­cine and a Strep­to­coc­cus pneu­mo­ni­ae vac­cine.

In ad­di­tion to pre­clin­i­cal re­search and IND stud­ies for all pro­grams, some of the cash will al­so be used to fund Phase I stud­ies for the flu shots and the Strep­to­coc­cus pneu­mo­ni­ae vac­cine, the biotech re­port­ed to the SEC.

Ireland has been on a roll in 2022, with several large pharma companies announcing multimillion-euro projects. Now AstraZeneca’s rare disease outfit Alexion is looking to get in on the action.

Alexion on Friday announced a €65 million ($68.8 million) investment in new and enhanced capabilities across two sites in the country, including at College Park in the Dublin suburb of Blanchardstown and the Monksland Industrial Park in the central Irish town of Athlone, according to the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland.

Amidst recently broader vaccine manufacturing initiatives from the EU and European companies, the G7 summit in the mountains of Bavaria has brought about some positive news for closing vaccine and medical product manufacturing gaps around the globe.

According to a statement from the White House, the G7 leaders have formally launched the partnership for global infrastructure, PGII. The effort will aim to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars to deliver infrastructure projects in several sectors including the medical and pharmaceutical manufacturing space.

Another biotech standing on shaky financial legs has fallen victim to the bears.

Merck partner 4D Pharma has reported that a key lender, Oxford Finance, shoved the UK company into administration after calling in a $14 million loan they couldn’t immediately make good on. Trading in their stock was halted with a market cap that had fallen to a mere £30 million.

“Despite the very difficult prevailing market conditions,” 4D reported on Friday, the biotech had been making progress on finding some new financing and turned to Oxford with an alternative late on Thursday and then again Friday morning.

Some Celgene shareholders aren’t happy with how Bristol Myers Squibb’s takeover went down.

On Friday, a New York federal judge ruled that they have a case against the pharma giant, denying a request to dismiss allegations that it purposely slow-rolled Breyanzi’s approval to avoid paying out $6.4 billion in contingent value rights (CVR).

When Bristol Myers put down $74 billion to scoop up Celgene back in 2019, liso-cel — the CAR-T lymphoma treatment now marketed as Breyanzi — was supposedly one of the centerpieces of the deal. After going back and forth on negotiations for about six months, BMS put $6.4 billion into a CVR agreement that required an FDA approval for Zeposia, Breyanzi and Abecma, each by an established date.