Af­ter lin­ing up a cou­ple of big bio­phar­ma col­lab­o­ra­tions with large up­front pay­ments in 2017, Cy­tomX $CT­MX is get­ting this year start­ed by bid­ding one of its first Big Phar­ma part­ners so long.

Sean Mc­Carthy,Cy­tomX CEO

The South San Fran­cis­co-based biotech says that Pfiz­er $PFE no­ti­fied them yes­ter­day that they are drop­ping out of the Pro­body deal, dis­card­ing its lat­est two tar­gets af­ter dump­ing the first on EGFR and nev­er go­ing af­ter the fourth. The deal, which start­ed out with a $25 mil­lion up­front pay­ment and a large $610 mil­lion pack­age of mile­stones, had helped val­i­date Cy­tomX’s plat­form tech on armed an­ti­bod­ies. Pfiz­er was look­ing for safer ver­sions of Er­bitux and Vectibix.

Cy­tomX scored $60 mil­lion in up­front cash when Am­gen signed up for a $1.5 bil­lion deal last fall. And that came af­ter Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb forked over $200 mil­lion in cash to get the biotech fo­cused on a safer, bet­ter CT­LA-4 to even­tu­al­ly suc­ceed Yer­voy.

Am­gen $AMGN jumped in for a T-cell en­gag­ing bis­pe­cif­ic tar­get­ing the Epi­der­mal Growth Fac­tor Re­cep­tor (EGFR), a high-val­ue tar­get ex­pressed on mul­ti­ple can­cer types. They’re build­ing on the biotech’s pre­clin­i­cal work on an EGFRx­CD3 pro­gram.

The biotech industry has faced repeated calls to diversify its workforce — and in the last year, those calls got a lot louder. Though women account for just under half of all biotech employees around the world, they occupy very few places in C-suites, and even fewer make it to the helm.

Some companies are listening, according to a recent BIO survey which showed that this year’s companies were 2.5 times more likely to have a diversity and inclusion program compared to last year’s sample. But we still have a long way to go. Women represent just 31% of biotech executives, BIO reported. And those numbers are even more stark for women of color.

A year after raising a $47 million launch round, the fungi-loving drug hunters at Hexagon Bio have more than doubled their coffers.

Hexagon announced today that it raised another $61 million for its efforts to design cancer and infectious disease drugs based on insights mined from the DNA in millions of species of fungi. The new financing brings Hexagon’s committed funding to over $108 million.

Bluebird bio announced it completed the rolling submission of its BLA to the FDA for betibeglogene autotemcel gene therapy.

The therapy, designed for patients with beta-thalassemia who require regular red blood cell transfusions, was previously granted breakthrough therapy designation for treating transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia (TDT). If approved, beti-cel will be the first hematopoietic stem cell ex-vivo gene therapy for patients in the US.