Is there enough en­thu­si­asm among biotech in­vestors to push through a $115 mil­lion-plus IPO on the lat­est biotech stak­ing out their claim with a new-and-im­proved BC­MA CAR-T ther­a­py?

Po­sei­da Ther­a­peu­tics is aim­ing to find that out in the very near fu­ture.

Er­ic Os­tertag

The San Diego-based biotech filed their S-1 on a busy Fri­day, just ahead of the big JP­Mor­gan con­fab that gets un­der­way Mon­day morn­ing in San Fran­cis­co. In it, they lay out an ear­ly snap­shot on Phase I da­ta for P-BC­MA-101 tar­get­ing mul­ti­ple myelo­ma — a fa­mil­iar tar­get in the CAR-T world these days.

Ac­cord­ing to the fil­ing, re­searchers have tracked 14 clin­i­cal re­spons­es among the first 19 pa­tients in their first hu­man study. And they in­clud­ed in that ORR every sign of ac­tiv­i­ty, from a com­plete re­sponse all the way through to a “min­i­mal re­sponse.” They al­so flagged CRs in 3 of 3 pa­tients get­ting the dose they plan to take in­to Phase II. And they down­played some se­ri­ous ad­verse events as like­ly linked to lym­phode­ple­tion, used to prep pa­tients for the drug.

The Phase II gets un­der­way in the first half of this year, and they’re plan­ning to push for an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval on that study. No, the FDA has not signed off on that plan, but it wouldn’t be wild­ly un­rea­son­able to ex­pect that they might.

The rest of the pipeline is pre­clin­i­cal.

The way the orig­i­nal CAR-T works is pret­ty sim­ple. You take a pa­tient’s cell and adapt it, adding chimeric anti­gen re­cep­tors to di­rect T cells to can­cer. Po­sei­da is sell­ing its IPO on the as­ser­tion that they’ve de­vel­oped bet­ter tech to do the same job, us­ing a DNA mod­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem that they say will se­lect more mem­o­ry T cells to do the work, which should make them more durable.

That’s the pitch, but they haven’t proved it yet.

Po­sei­da is rolling ahead in­to a tur­bu­lent stock mar­ket, where con­cerns about an eco­nom­ic slow­down and a trade war with Chi­na have tak­en a heavy toll on tech stocks. An­oth­er big con­cern: Mod­er­na $MR­NA was not able to hold on to its lofty mar­ket val­u­a­tion af­ter go­ing pub­lic, rais­ing con­cerns that in­vestors have grown tired of see­ing too many biotechs with too lit­tle da­ta to back up these of­fer­ings.

That en­vi­ron­ment will make this IPO and oth­ers filed re­cent­ly ones to watch.

Ma­lin Life Sci­ences out of Ire­land has the biggest stake in the biotech, at 33%. CEO Er­ic Os­tertag’s trust holds 15% while Ti­tan LLC has 13.6% of the stock and Lon­gi­tude Ven­ture Part­ners III holds 7.7%.

Os­tertag’s back­ground in­cludes found­ing Trans­posagen, based in Lex­ing­ton, KY. That com­pa­ny has been work­ing with gene edit­ing tech and cell reengi­neer­ing for year. Po­sei­da is a spin­out of that com­pa­ny, us­ing much the same tech, with an eye to de­vel­op­ing off-the-shelf cell ther­a­pies as well.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas’ prostate cancer drug Xtandi even as the federal government helped to pay for its development.

NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News, the institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public” and “given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug.”

The FDA on Tuesday released a warning letter sent earlier this month to the Mason, OH-based site of Procter & Gamble Manufactura, raising questions about the list of ingredients on the label and in the electronic filing.

The warning says that for P&G’s over-the-counter Vicks Nyquil Severe Hot Remedy Cold and Flu Plus Congestion, there’s a “mismatched” list of active ingredients between the labeling and the electronic listing file. The listing file for the active ingredients did not match the active ingredients in the electronic file.