On the same day As­cle­tis start­ed pub­licly pitch­ing its his­toric IPO on the Hong Kong stock ex­change, an­oth­er home­grown drug­mak­er is tak­ing its own shot at a pub­lic list­ing.

Xue­feng Yu

Prob­a­bly best known for its Ebo­la vac­cine — which got ap­proved and ac­cept­ed in­to Chi­na’s na­tion­al stock­pile last Oc­to­ber — CanSi­no Bi­o­log­ics is de­vel­op­ing 15 vac­cine can­di­dates for 12 dis­ease ar­eas in to­tal. The lead pro­grams fo­cus on meningo­coc­cal con­ju­gate vac­cines, fol­lowed by ver­sions of the com­mon DTP vac­cine, both of which would be boost­ed by the raise.

As its name (quite sub­tly) sug­gests, CanSi­no has its roots in the Cana­di­an/Chi­nese con­nec­tion the founders shared. It all start­ed, CEO Xue­feng Yu writes in an open­ing let­ter, on a sum­mer day about 10 years ago, when He­len Hui­hua Mao, Dongxu Qiu, Tao Zhu and him­self gath­ered for a bar­beque in Toron­to.

He­len Hui­hua Mao

As se­nior ex­ecs at Sanofi Pas­teur, As­traZeneca and Wyeth, they saw all too well the glar­ing gap in vac­cine de­vel­op­ment as il­lus­trat­ed by Yu’s sto­ries from his trips to Chi­na. Then they made a de­ci­sion that sur­prised even them­selves: to start a com­pa­ny that would not on­ly pro­duce bet­ter al­ter­na­tives to cur­rent or im­port­ed vac­cines, but al­so come up with “glob­al­ly in­no­v­a­tive” vac­cines based on Chi­na’s un­met med­ical needs.

Dongxu Qiu

That was 2009. Nine years lat­er, they have at­tract­ed top-notch in­vestors at Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures (18.75%) and Qim­ing Ven­tures (8.10%) as well as the state-owned Fu­ture In­dus­try De­vel­op­ment Fund (5.50%) to back their vi­sion. The founders, who are now joined by for­mer As­traZeneca top ex­ec Shou-Bai Chao in run­ning the com­pa­ny, each hold around 10% of the stock.

Tao Zhu

As CanSi­no moves for­ward with two Phase III MCV pro­grams, two Phase I DTP vac­cines, an ear­ly-stage tu­ber­cu­lo­sis boost­er and a slate of oth­er pre­clin­i­cal projects, they’ve al­so start­ed build­ing up a com­mer­cial plan. The plan, they write in the ap­pli­ca­tion, is to have 100 staffers ded­i­cat­ed to sell­ing the vac­cines to lo­cal cen­ters for dis­ease con­trol, ini­tial­ly in 30 eco­nom­i­cal­ly-de­vel­oped cities and grad­u­al­ly ex­pand­ing to oth­er lo­ca­tions.

If As­cle­tis’ progress is any in­di­ca­tion, the HKEX reg­u­la­tors — as­sist­ed by a pan­el of es­teemed biotech pro­fes­sion­als — will have no prob­lem by keep­ing the vet­ting process with­in the promised 12 weeks.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.