A pro­lif­ic SPAC cre­ator has found a busi­ness part­ner for its fifth blank check com­pa­ny with just four weeks to go be­fore a busi­ness com­bi­na­tion dead­line. Its part­ner had on­ly dis­closed a mod­est $27 mil­lion Se­ries A last Oc­to­ber as it plans to go af­ter sim­i­lar tar­gets as Bay­er and Roche.

The name of the SPAC op­er­a­tor might not be fa­mil­iar but its first part­ner like­ly is: Play­boy. Then, pre­scrip­tion dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics start­up Bet­ter Ther­a­peu­tics. Third in line: dig­i­tal health­care com­pa­ny ETAO, which had its val­u­a­tion slashed from $2.5 bil­lion to $1 bil­lion dur­ing the SPAC process. In May, a Chi­na-based elec­tric ve­hi­cle mak­er signed up.

Now, it’s AUM Bio­sciences’ turn. The clin­i­cal-stage Sin­ga­pore-based can­cer biotech — with of­fices in Bethes­da, MD; Colling­wood, Aus­tralia; and Suzhou, Chi­na — makes the move just days af­ter an­oth­er life sci­ences SPAC threw in the tow­el and as a sec­ond struck a deal.

The blank check route has been a bumpy ride in the past year, fol­low­ing a pan­dem­ic boon for the quick­er-to-Wall Street ve­hi­cle than the tra­di­tion­al list­ing, but mul­ti­ple deals in the drug de­vel­op­ment world have been re­vealed in re­cent weeks. Some biotechs have com­plete­ly re­neged on com­bi­na­tion plans.

With the planned en­try on­to Nas­daq as AUMB, the start­up will gain $69 mil­lion from the deal with Moun­tain Crest Ac­qui­si­tion Corp. V. But AUM will like­ly face an up­hill bat­tle as have so many life sci­ences com­pa­nies and those in oth­er in­dus­tries fol­low­ing a SPAC merg­er. Bet­ter Ther­a­peu­tics is a shell of the $10 at which its pub­lic jour­ney be­gan. So is Play­boy, er, PL­BY Group.

AUM will have a pre-mon­ey val­u­a­tion of $400 mil­lion, and the fi­nanc­ing will help beef up US op­er­a­tions and clin­i­cal work, the com­pa­ny said.

Ac­cord­ing to a fed­er­al tri­als data­base, AUM was slat­ed to kick off a Phase II last week test­ing its lead drug, AUM001, as a monother­a­py and in com­bi­na­tion with Mer­ck’s Keytru­da in metasta­t­ic col­orec­tal can­cer. An­oth­er com­bi­na­tion study of the MNK in­hibitor, paired up with Roche’s Tecen­triq, is al­so planned for pa­tients with non-small cell lung can­cer and urothe­lial can­cer.

Al­so in the MNK space is eF­FEC­TOR Ther­a­peu­tics, with tomivosert­ib in mid-stage stud­ies, al­so com­bined with Keytru­da. That pro­gram ran in­to a hur­dle at the be­gin­ning of this year, months af­ter eF­FEC­TOR went pub­lic via its own SPAC deal.

Fur­ther down in the pipeline are AUM601 and AUM302. The first is “on track to en­ter Phase 2,” AUM said Thurs­day, not­ing it’s tar­get­ing TRK mu­ta­tions. The lat­ter is a macro­cyclic oral ki­nase in­hibitor small mol­e­cule that the biotech claims will com­bine in­hi­bi­tion of pan-PIM ki­nase, pan-PI3K and mTOR all in one.

The TRK in­hibitor comes from Han­dok and CMG Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, un­der undis­closed terms and for world­wide rights, save for Ko­rea. TRK is fa­mil­iar among Big Phar­ma: Bay­er’s Vi­t­rakvi (via Loxo On­col­o­gy) blocks the pro­tein, and Roche’s Ro­z­lytrek al­so goes af­ter TRK.

AUM is al­so about to en­ter year three of a five-year tie-up with New­soara Bio­phar­ma, in which the lat­ter gains Greater Chi­na rights to co-de­vel­op up to six on­col­o­gy drugs, in­clud­ing ‘001 and ‘302.

Suy­ing Liu

As for the SPAC op­er­a­tor, Moun­tain Crest has lit­tle biotech ex­pe­ri­ence on its board. The chair, Suy­ing Liu, was on the busi­ness fac­ul­ty at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis and then held stints across JP Mor­gan and oth­er firms, main­ly fo­cused on re­al es­tate. Al­so on the board is Liu’s fel­low Wash U col­league Todd Mil­bourn; Azia Cap­i­tal Fund part­ner Wen­hua Zhang; and oil & gas ex­ec­u­tive Nel­son Haight.

In a Nas­daq video post­ed last De­cem­ber, Liu talks about his SPAC part­ners’ strat­e­gy of rolling up ad­di­tion­al com­pa­nies post-merg­er. Time will tell if AUM finds more biotechs to bring in­to the fold.

AUM CEO Vishal Doshi said in pre­pared re­marks that the com­pa­ny is on track to hit mul­ti­ple mile­stones in the next two years. Liu tout­ed the deal will give AUM a “greater US foot­print.”

Ex­pect a trans­ac­tion clos­ing in the first three months of 2023.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

ViiV Healthcare has teamed up with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool and three generic manufacturers to expand access to medicine that can prevent HIV.

ViiV and the Medicines Patent Pool jointly announced Thursday that the MPP signed sub-licensing agreements with Aurobindo, Cipla and Viatris to manufacture generics of a long-acting form of cabotegravir for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As a result of the agreement, the manufacturers will be able to develop, manufacture and supply generic versions of cabotegravir LA in 90 countries — subject to regulatory approvals.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.