A leader of the next wave of AI-dri­ven biotechs com­plet­ed one of the in­dus­try's largest IPOs in years, rais­ing about $400 mil­lion in a sale of shares that will be­gin trad­ing Fri­day.

Just min­utes af­ter ring­ing Nas­daq's open­ing bell Fri­day, and sur­round­ed by sev­er­al dozen cowork­ers, Gen­er­ate:Bio­med­i­cines CEO Mike Nal­ly spoke with End­points News about the Somerville, MA-based biotech's plans for the new cash.

Much of it will pay the bills for typ­i­cal drug de­vel­op­ment, bankrolling Phase 3 stud­ies for its lead pro­gram, a TSLP-tar­get­ing an­ti­body that is be­ing stud­ied in asth­ma. Nal­ly cred­it­ed that pro­gram with help­ing Gen­er­ate through a speedy IPO process.

Re­searchers have rolled out an­oth­er win for the Pad­cev-Keytru­da com­bi­na­tion, this time as a first treat­ment for a form of blad­der can­cer.

It's the sec­ond re­cent win for the com­bo af­ter last year's pos­i­tive read­out in an­oth­er tri­al for a dif­fer­ent group of blad­der can­cer pa­tients. Ul­ti­mate­ly, that oth­er tri­al led to an FDA ap­proval for the com­bi­na­tion.

The lat­est Phase 3 tri­al, al­ready toplined last De­cem­ber, looked at 808 pa­tients who were hav­ing surgery for mus­cle-in­va­sive blad­der can­cer. They re­ceived ei­ther chemother­a­py be­fore the surgery, or a com­bi­na­tion of Pad­cev and Keytru­da be­fore and af­ter the pro­ce­dure. The tri­al was spon­sored by Pfiz­er, Astel­las and Mer­ck.