Rani Ther­a­peu­tics has tapped the ven­ture well again, this time rais­ing a sweet $69 mil­lion for its push to make in­jectable med­i­cines go down in a more de­light­ful way.

The San Jose, CA-based biotech is work­ing on a ro­bot­ic pill — dubbed the Ra­niP­ill — that’s de­signed to re­place in­jectable drugs like in­sulin. Rani says the Se­ries E round, which brings its to­tal raise to $211 mil­lion, will go straight in­to clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing for the can­di­date.

The idea of trans­form­ing in­jecta­bles in­to pills isn’t a new one. But a string of ef­forts to evade the en­zymes that break down an oral drug be­fore it can be ab­sorbed have large­ly hit a wall. Rani’s can­di­date has an en­teric coat­ing that pro­tects it from the acidic am­bi­ence of the stom­ach, then dis­solves as the pill moves in­to the in­tes­tine and pH lev­els rise. A chem­i­cal re­ac­tion in­flates a bal­loon, and the pres­sure push­es a dis­solv­able mi­cronee­dle in­to the in­testi­nal wall.

The in­jec­tion is pain-free, a Rani spokesper­son said. And be­cause the tech­nol­o­gy is ag­nos­tic to the pay­load, Rani be­lieves it could be used to de­liv­er pep­tides, pro­teins and an­ti­bod­ies.

So far the No­var­tis and Take­da-part­nered com­pa­ny has test­ed 9 mol­e­cules in pre­clin­i­cal stud­ies, and con­duct­ed clin­i­cal tri­als with adal­i­mum­ab, GLP-1 and oc­treotide — a mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body, meta­bol­ic drug and pep­tide, re­spec­tive­ly.

Back in Jan­u­ary, Rani said it got the re­sults it was look­ing for in an ear­ly-stage tri­al with oc­treotide. A to­tal of 58 vol­un­teers were en­rolled, 52 of whom got the Ra­niP­ill ver­sion, and 6 of whom got an in­tra­venous in­jec­tion with an iden­ti­cal dose. Rani CEO Mir Im­ran told End­points News at the time that the com­pa­ny proved its hy­poth­e­sis: The pa­tients didn’t feel a thing.

“And then the sec­ond end­point was bioavail­abil­i­ty, which turned out to be greater than 70%. Which is what ex­act­ly we had seen in our pre­clin­i­cal test­ing,” he said, adding that Rani would con­duct a head-to-head study to prove equiv­a­lence or non-in­fe­ri­or­i­ty to the in­jectable ver­sion.

Im­ran al­so said in Jan­u­ary that an IPO was a “dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty” in about a year — which would be just about any time now. When asked on Fri­day if an IPO is in the near fu­ture, the com­pa­ny didn’t say yes. But they didn’t ex­act­ly say no, ei­ther.

“Right now we are fo­cused on ad­vanc­ing the clin­i­cal tri­als of our in­ter­nal pipeline of drugs, and our in-house man­u­fac­tur­ing of the Ra­niP­ill,” a spokesper­son said. “We do not com­ment on fu­ture fi­nanc­ing plans.”

Last year, a team of MIT and No­vo Nordisk sci­en­tists re­port­ed pos­i­tive an­i­mal re­sults from their own stab at a ro­bot­ic pill. Their can­di­date con­sists of a nee­dle in­side a cap­sule made of com­pressed freeze-dried in­sulin. Up­on con­tact with the wet in­ner lin­ing of the stom­ach, a sug­ar disk hold­ing the nee­dle in place dis­solves.

The pill de­liv­ered enough in­sulin to low­er an­i­mals’ blood sug­ar to lev­els sim­i­lar to in­jec­tions, ac­cord­ing to the re­searchers, who said they were still a few years away from the clin­ic.

There are some odd-looking purple creatures lurking around the halls of AstraZenca lately. The “Phil” character cutouts are purple, personified eosinophils with big buggy eyes and wide mouths, and they’re a part of AZ’s newest awareness effort to help people understand eosinophilic asthma.

The “Asthma Behaving Badly” characters aren’t only on the walls at AZ to show the new campaign to employees, however. The “Phils” are also showing up online on the campaign website, and in digital and social ads and posts on Facebook and Instagram.

In response to a question on manufacturing scale at Legend Biotech’s R&D day yesterday, the company’s top exec said its partnership with Johnson & Johnson will be doubling its investment in its New Jersey manufacturing center and will be investing a total of $500 million.

With an eye on their BCMA-directed CAR-T therapy Carvykti (cilta-cel), approved in February as a fifth-line treatment for multiple myeloma, Legend CEO Ying Huang said that the ramp-up in production and the decision to manufacture its own lentiviral vectors — currently in shortage worldwide — means they won’t have to deal with that shortage.

Kite Pharma just got FDA approval to kick off operations at a new manufacturing campus.

The cancer-focused, CAR-T cell therapy player made the announcement Monday, saying that the federal regulatory agency gave the green light to Kite’s 100,000 square-foot, retroviral vector manufacturing facility in Oceanside, CA.

Kite’s global head of technical operations Chris McDonald tells Endpoints News that the facility has been in the works for about four years, after Kite teamed up with its parent company Gilead. Gilead acquired Kite Pharma for just shy of $12 billion in 2017.