Zai Lab is set to net more than $761 mil­lion from its sec­ondary list­ing in Hong Kong af­ter pric­ing the IPO at $72.51 (HKD$562) — just a hair be­low its Nas­daq clos­ing price on Mon­day, Bloomberg and Nikkei Asian Re­view re­port­ed.

Saman­tha Du

A pi­o­neer in bring­ing West­ern drugs to Chi­na, co-founder and CEO Saman­tha Du has more than tripled Zai Lab’s mar­ket cap in the three years it’s been pub­lic in the US. The HKEX list­ing is de­signed to fund R&D and com­mer­cial­iza­tion for the cur­rent port­fo­lio while fu­el­ing new in-li­cens­ing pacts, the biotech wrote in a fil­ing.

The 12 can­di­dates come from Glax­o­SmithK­line, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb, Paratek, Five Prime, En­ta­sis, Novo­cure, Macro­Gen­ics, De­ci­phera, In­cyte, Re­gen­eron and Turn­ing Point. While the deals most­ly cov­er main­land Chi­na, Hong Kong and Macau, in some cas­es Zai Lab is al­so grab­bing rights in Tai­wan, Aus­tralia, New Zealand and oth­er coun­tries in the Asia Pa­cif­ic re­gion.

Most promi­nent among them is Ze­ju­la, the PARP in­hibitor that drew GSK to buy out Tesaro for $5.1 bil­lion. There’s al­so one oth­er com­mer­cial prod­uct in Op­tune, a de­vice ap­proved to treat glioblas­toma mul­ti­forme.

The pro­ceeds will al­so fund de­vel­op­ment of two com­pounds dis­cov­ered in-house, which tar­get IL-17 for pso­ri­a­sis and CD47 for can­cer re­spec­tive­ly.

Giv­en the re­quire­ment that in­vestors buy 50 shares, it has one of the high­est thresh­olds for a new stock, lo­cal me­dia not­ed. The to­tal price was cit­ed as a rea­son why Zai Lab was on­ly slight­ly over­sub­scribed.

The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence has been a bright spot within the agency in terms of speeding new treatments to patients. That flexibility was on full display this morning as FDA released new draft guidance spelling out exactly how oncology drug developers can fulfill both the accelerated and full approval’s requirements with just a single randomized controlled trial.

While Congress recently passed legislation that will allow FDA to require confirmatory trials to be recruiting and ongoing prior to granting an accelerated approval, the agency is now making clear that the initial trial used to win the AA, if designed appropriately, can also serve as the trial for converting the accelerated approval into a full approval.

Digital therapeutics company Better Therapeutics announced on Thursday that it’s cutting 35% of its staff as it awaits FDA clearance for its first product.

The company, which launched eight years ago, is one of a growing group of companies seeking a digital alternative to traditional medicine. The space saw a record $7.5 billion in investments in 2021, according to Chris Dokomajilar at DealForma, with uses spanning ADHD, PTSD and other indications. However, private insurers have been slow to hop on board.