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.

Peter Marks appeared before a virtual SVB Leerink audience yesterday and said that his staff at FDA’s CBER is on the verge of working around the clock. Manufacturing inspections, policy work and sponsor communications have all been pushed down the to-do list so that they can be responsive to Covid-related interactions. And the agency’s objective right now? “To save as many lives as we can,” Marks said, likening the mortality on the current outbreak as equivalent to “a nuclear bomb on a small city.”

It’s another day of hauling cash in the biopharma world as four more IPOs priced Friday and a fifth filed its initial paperwork.

The biggest offering comes from PMV Pharma, an oncology biotech focusing on p53 mutations, which raised $211.8 million after pricing shares at $18 apiece. Prelude Therapeutics, developing PRMT5 inhibitors for rare cancers, was next with a $158 million raise, pricing shares at $19 each. Graybug Vision raised $90 million after pricing at $16 per share for its wet AMD candidates, and breast cancer biotech Greenwich Lifesciences brought up the rear with a small, $7 million raise after pricing shares at $5.75.

Days after J&J dosed the first participants of its Phase III ENSEMBLE trial, the pharma giant has detailed the early-stage data that gave them confidence in a single-dose regimen.

Testing two dose levels either as a single dose or in a two-dose schedule spaced by 56 days in, the scientists from Janssen, the J&J subsidiary developing its vaccine, reported that the low dose induced a similar immune response as the high dose. The interim Phase I/IIa results were posted in a preprint on medRxiv.

Sitting atop the executive branch, President Donald Trump is the ultimate authority at the FDA. He can fast track any vaccine to approval himself. If it came to that, of course.

What he can’t do is unilaterally order the legislative branch to loosen the Treasury’s coffers for $6.6 billion. Nor can he command pharmaceutical companies to pay for $200 vouchers sent to 33 million Medicare beneficiaries for prescription drugs before the election.

The concerns keep mounting over President Donald Trump’s politicization of the FDA and other federal agencies guiding the development of a safe and effective vaccine. And today, the telegenic New York governor Andrew Cuomo appeared to introduce even more politics into the matter — latest in an ongoing series of incidents that have cast the proudly independent FDA in starkly political terms.

During his daily press conference Cuomo said that the state will review any coronavirus vaccines approved by the federal government, citing a lack of trust in the Trump administration. The announcement comes one day after Trump accused the FDA of making an “extremely political” move in proposing stricter vaccine guidance.

In the latest incident where Alex Azar has steadfastly taken the side of President Donald Trump over that of the FDA, the HHS secretary was noncommittal this morning when asked if he supports the attempt by his subordinates at the FDA to strengthen guidelines for a vaccine EUA.

Appearing on NBC’s Today Show, the HHS secretary muddied the waters, stating that the guidance that matters is the one that is “actually already out there.”