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.

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.

While falling behind the biggest PD-(L)1 drugs in terms of sales, Roche has looked to carve out a space for its Tecentriq with a growing expertise in lung cancer. The drug will now take an early lead in the sought-after adjuvant setting — but competitors are on the way.

The FDA on Friday approved Tecentriq as an adjuvant therapy for patients with Stage II-IIIA non small cell lung cancer with PD-(L)1 scores greater than or equal to 1, making it the first drug of its kind approved in an early setting that covers around 40% of all NSCLC patients.

Three new entities priced their public debuts late Thursday and early Friday, including a SPAC, a traditional Nasdaq IPO and a Chinese biotech joining the Hong Kong Index.

Shanghai-based Abbisko Therapeutics raised the most money of the triumvirate, garnering $226 million in its Hong Kong debut and pricing at HK$12.46, or roughly $1.60 in US dollars. The blank check company followed up with a $150 million raise, while MiNK Therapeutics priced on Nasdaq at $12 per share and a $40 million raise.

While a horde of drugmakers develops bispecific antibodies to more directly target tumor cells — there were about 100 programs in or nearing clinical trials back in May — a new company is emerging to go one step further.

On Thursday, Tentarix Biotherapeutics unveiled a $50 million Series A round to support its next-gen multi-specifics platform. While the field has largely focused on bispecifics, which engage two targets, Tentarix believes its multifunctional programs have the potential to be even more specific, since more conditions must be met for potent activity to occur.