Sin­ga­pore-based drug­mak­er Aslan Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals priced its IPO to­day way un­der Wall Street’s ex­pec­ta­tions, bring­ing in a lit­tle more than half the tar­get haul it an­nounced in March.

The com­pa­ny raised $42 mil­lion in the pub­lic of­fer­ing Fri­day, a far cry from the $86 mil­lion it first set in­ten­tions for in a SEC fil­ing just six weeks pri­or. It of­fered 6 mil­lion shares at $7.03, list­ing on the Nas­daq un­der the tick­er $ASLN. Aslan’s stock dropped pret­ty im­me­di­ate­ly, sink­ing as low as 26% this morn­ing to $5.28 per share. Al­though it’s climb­ing up as the hours tick by, the stock is still trad­ing at about 18% be­low open as of press time.

Carl Firth

With a lead on­col­o­gy drug in a piv­otal study for bil­iary tract can­cer and a slate of key cat­a­lysts com­ing up in oth­er tri­als, Aslan plans to use the pro­ceeds to push for­ward its pipeline. Helmed by Carl Firth — the for­mer BD chief for As­traZeneca in Asia who owns 4.7% of the stock — Aslan has a glob­al strat­e­gy to roll out its can­cer drugs in Chi­na, the US, and Eu­rope. The lead prod­uct can­di­date is var­l­i­tinib, a pan-HER drug that is al­so in the clin­ic for gas­tric, breast and col­orec­tal can­cers.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

It’s been a busy fall on Wall Street — and this week, we’ve got another biotech going public after Ventyx yesterday.

Massachusetts solid-tumor biotech Xilio Therapeutics made its public debut today, joining 149 other biotechs that have gone public so far this year.

Back on October 1st, Xilio filed its S-1 with the SEC to make its IPO debut for $100 million — the next step in financing after completing a $95 million Series C back in February.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.