Things have just gone from bad to worse at Hop­kin­ton, MA-based Spring Bank Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

Re­searchers say that a pa­tient died in their Phase IIb study of ina­ri­givir for hep B — and they’re scrap­ping the work and shift­ing fo­cus to STING.

News of the pa­tient death came just weeks af­ter the biotech told in­vestors that safe­ty prob­lems marked by po­ten­tial liv­er dam­ag­ing he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar dys­func­tion and in­creas­es of ALT forced them to halt dos­ing over the Christ­mas break. That pause caused 1 rout for their share price, which once trad­ed north of $18 a share.

The lat­est rout fol­lowed the news Wednes­day morn­ing. The stock $SBPH tanked, drop­ping 26% more and leav­ing the share price just above the $1 mark.

Spring Bank’s work in STING cov­ers both an­tag­o­nists for in­flam­ma­to­ry con­di­tions and ag­o­nists for can­cer.

The STING strat­e­gy may not sit well with back­ers, though, as it has ex­pe­ri­enced sev­er­al set­backs at oth­er de­vel­op­ers in­ter­est­ed in see­ing its ef­fi­ca­cy in on­col­o­gy.

The biotech now plans to put its chimeric oligonu­cleotide an­ti­sense (CA­SO) pro­gram for HBV up for a li­cens­ing deal while slash­ing any HBV costs in the bud­get. “The com­pa­ny be­lieves its $54.5 mil­lion cash po­si­tion as of Dec. 31 will be enough to fund op­er­a­tions in­to late 2022.”

Peter Marks appeared before a virtual SVB Leerink audience yesterday and said that his staff at FDA’s CBER is on the verge of working around the clock. Manufacturing inspections, policy work and sponsor communications have all been pushed down the to-do list so that they can be responsive to Covid-related interactions. And the agency’s objective right now? “To save as many lives as we can,” Marks said, likening the mortality on the current outbreak as equivalent to “a nuclear bomb on a small city.”

It’s another day of hauling cash in the biopharma world as four more IPOs priced Friday and a fifth filed its initial paperwork.

The biggest offering comes from PMV Pharma, an oncology biotech focusing on p53 mutations, which raised $211.8 million after pricing shares at $18 apiece. Prelude Therapeutics, developing PRMT5 inhibitors for rare cancers, was next with a $158 million raise, pricing shares at $19 each. Graybug Vision raised $90 million after pricing at $16 per share for its wet AMD candidates, and breast cancer biotech Greenwich Lifesciences brought up the rear with a small, $7 million raise after pricing shares at $5.75.

Days after J&J dosed the first participants of its Phase III ENSEMBLE trial, the pharma giant has detailed the early-stage data that gave them confidence in a single-dose regimen.

Testing two dose levels either as a single dose or in a two-dose schedule spaced by 56 days in, the scientists from Janssen, the J&J subsidiary developing its vaccine, reported that the low dose induced a similar immune response as the high dose. The interim Phase I/IIa results were posted in a preprint on medRxiv.

Sitting atop the executive branch, President Donald Trump is the ultimate authority at the FDA. He can fast track any vaccine to approval himself. If it came to that, of course.

What he can’t do is unilaterally order the legislative branch to loosen the Treasury’s coffers for $6.6 billion. Nor can he command pharmaceutical companies to pay for $200 vouchers sent to 33 million Medicare beneficiaries for prescription drugs before the election.

Palladio Biosciences just took one step further in its quest to topple Otsuka’s Samsca with its own — it hopes safer — autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) drug.

The Pennsylvania-based biotech announced a $20 million Series B on Friday, which will fund a 10-person Phase III trial of its vasopressin V2 receptor agonist, lixivaptan. CEO Alex Martin expects to read out data in the first half of next year, then launch straight into a larger pivotal Phase III study with about 1,200 participants.