With its cash re­serves shrink­ing and its stock stuck in pen­ny stock ter­ri­to­ry, tiny Si­en­na Bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is bring­ing in Cowen to ex­plore what kind of fi­nan­cial and strate­gic al­ter­na­tives it can drum up at this point. And that event is point­ing shares south again.

Fred­er­ick Bed­ding­field Si­en­na

Si­en­na needs to raise cash to pay for a planned Phase III piv­otal of their new lead drug SNA-120, a Tr­kA in­hibitor for pso­ri­a­sis, which the biotech says won’t get start­ed with­out the mon­ey to pay for it.

Si­en­na raised $65 mil­lion from its IPO a few years ago, pric­ing at $15 a share. The stock $SNNA lat­er climbed, but then crashed on clin­i­cal fail­ure. Two stud­ies for its lead ac­ne drug failed a year ago, dis­ap­point­ing in­vestors and leav­ing the stock at 85 cents at the Fri­day close.

The stock quick­ly lost 11% on the news Mon­day.

“These da­ta are clear and un­am­bigu­ous,” CEO Fred­er­ick Bed­ding­field said at the time of the set­back. In­vestors haven’t been quick to for­give.

After spending years developing its oral formulation of the corticosteroid budesonide, Sweden’s Calliditas now has its sights set on the primary biliary cholangitis field.

The company will buy out France-based Genkyotex, and it’s willing to bet up to €87 million ($102 million) that Genkyotex’s failed Phase II drug, GKT831, will do better in late-stage trials.

Under the current agreement, Calliditas $CALT will initially pay €20.3 million in cash for 62.7% of Genkyotex (or €2.80 a piece for 7,236,515 shares) in early October, then circle back for the rest of Genkyotex’s shares under the same terms. If nothing changes, the whole buyout will cost Calliditas €32.3 million, plus up to  €55 million in contingent rights.

Roche had big plans for etrolizumab. Eyeing a hyper-competitive IBD and Crohn’s market where they have not historically been a player, the company rolled out 8 different Phase III trials, testing the antibody for two different uses across a range of different patient groups.

On Monday, Roche released results for 4 of those studies, and they mark a decided setback for both the Swiss pharma and their biotech sub Genentech, potentially spelling an end to a drug they put over half-a-decade and millions of dollars behind.

CanSino began the year with a clear goal to secure a secondary listing on Shanghai’s STAR market. Then something more urgent came along: As a rising vaccine developer on a mission to bring global standard immunizations to China, it heeded the call to make a vaccine to protect against a virus that would paralyze the whole world.

Xuefeng Yu and his team managed to keep doing both.

More than a month after CanSino’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate is authorized for military use in China, the Hong Kong-listed company has made a roaring debut in Shanghai. It fetched $748 million (RMB$5.2 billion) by floating 24.8 million shares, and soared 88% on its first trading day.

Does precision medicine work?

The approach, based on finding a drug to target a patient’s specific genes, has undoubtedly saved individual lives, spurring Lazarus-like reversals in health in once-terminally ill patients. But critics have pointed out that its pursuit has meant drug companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to target mutations that affect narrow slices of the populations, and that many of the gains researchers thought it would bring have eroded as cancers evolve resistance.