Unum $UM­RX is work­ing its way through a sur­vival plan of sorts.

Af­ter get­ting hit with a trio of FDA holds in its brief pub­lic his­to­ry and trig­ger­ing its sec­ond piv­ot to a new lead drug pro­gram while lay­ing off 60% of the staff, the trou­bled pen­ny stock biotech Unum Ther­a­peu­tics has hatched new plans to se­cure fi­nan­cial back­ing while lin­ing up a go-for­ward strat­e­gy for the com­pa­ny.

First, Lin­coln Park Cap­i­tal Fund has agreed to buy up to $25 mil­lion of the long-suf­fer­ing stock, as Unum di­rects. And the ex­ec­u­tive team — led by CEO Chuck Wil­son — has put every­thing on the ta­ble for con­sid­er­a­tion: a sale, ac­qui­si­tion, merg­er, li­cens­ing deal, you name it. The AC­TR707 pro­gram, mean­while, is be­ing for­mal­ly wrapped up — their sec­ond failed lead pro­gram.

Chuck Wil­son

“We re­cent­ly an­nounced the con­clu­sion of our Phase 1 AC­TR707 pro­grams and re­struc­tur­ing to pri­or­i­tize our ca­pa­bil­i­ties and re­sources to­wards ad­vanc­ing our pre­clin­i­cal pro­gram, BOXR1030, and BOXR plat­form aimed at dis­cov­er­ing nov­el ‘bolt-on’ trans­genes to help T cells sur­vive longer and per­form bet­ter in the sol­id tu­mor mi­croen­vi­ron­ment,” said Wil­son in a pre­pared state­ment. “While tak­ing steps in­ter­nal­ly to ad­vance BOXR1030 and the BOXR plat­form giv­en the broad po­ten­tial we see to im­prove cell ther­a­pies in sol­id tu­mors, we are al­so tak­ing steps to eval­u­ate ex­ter­nal op­por­tu­ni­ties as well and in this con­text, and with align­ment from our Board of Di­rec­tors, we are al­so ac­tive­ly seek­ing strate­gic al­ter­na­tives to max­i­mize share­hold­er val­ue, in­clud­ing a sale or merg­er of the Com­pa­ny at this time.”

Wed­bush’s David Nieren­garten says he’s en­cour­aged to see the com­pa­ny’s shift in­to sur­vival mode.

While UM­RX has se­cured a stock pur­chase agree­ment for up to $25M of its com­mon stock over a 36-month pe­ri­od with Lin­coln Park Cap­i­tal Fund, the com­pa­ny’s share price has most­ly trad­ed be­low $1 since mid-No­vem­ber and mean­ing­ful da­ta read­outs are out of most in­vestors’ time win­dows.

Laden­burg Thal­mann has been brought in to ad­vise the biotech.

Earlier this month, Flagship announced their big bet on the software half the industry is talking about, launching the AI and machine learning startup. Now, they and a couple other investors are gambling $100 million on a software that much of the public generally thinks of as a cool, IT afterthought: cloud computing.

The idea, says founder and Flagship partner David Berry, is one of scale: The sheer magnitude of biological data that you can store on cloud technology is unprecedented. And that size, when leveraged properly, can allow you to ask questions and form insights that are similarly unprecedented.

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The FDA is set to release new guidance that would raise safety and efficacy requirements for a vaccine EUA above earlier guidance and above the criteria used for convalescent plasma or hydroxychloroquine, The Washington Post reported. Experts say this significantly lowers the odds of an approval before the election on November 3, which Trump has promised despite vocal concerns from public health officials, and could help shore up public trust in the agency and any eventual vaccine.