The horde of zom­bie biotechs lurch­ing ahead and bare­ly sur­viv­ing has reached a cri­sis lev­el for some in­vestors.

Now there’s a new in­vest­ment fund tar­get­ing these com­pa­nies. Nicholas John­ston, a long­time health­care banker at JP Mor­gan and Perel­la Wein­berg Part­ners, re­cent­ly launched Alis Bio­sciences, aim­ing to un­lock over $30 bil­lion in “trapped” cap­i­tal on the books of an es­ti­mat­ed 300 pub­licly trad­ed biotechs.

“I’ve looked at this prob­lem for 25 years and there’s nev­er been a vi­able so­lu­tion,” said John­ston, who has al­so done stints work­ing in the biotech and medtech in­dus­tries.

Un­der John­ston’s di­rec­tion, Alis wants to work with C-suites and boards to make bet­ter use of that cash. The fund has a va­ri­ety of pos­si­ble struc­tures, vary­ing in com­plex­i­ty, but the goal is to hand back to share­hold­ers some por­tion of a com­pa­ny’s cash.

ALX On­col­o­gy’s ef­forts to progress a CD47 com­bo hit a ma­jor speed bump.

The com­pa­ny said Fri­day that two tri­als test­ing dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of its CD47-tar­get­ing drug failed to meet their pri­ma­ry end­points in head and neck squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma. One study eval­u­at­ed evor­pacept with Mer­ck’s Keytru­da, and the oth­er looked at evor­pacept with Keytru­da and chemother­a­py.

ALX will no longer de­vel­op evor­pacept in com­bi­na­tion with Keytru­da as a re­sult. Al­ready a pen­ny stock, ALX’s share price ALXO was down about 5% on Fri­day morn­ing.

The re­sults, which did not in­clude spe­cif­ic da­ta, are a ma­jor blow to ALX, which was hope­ful that suc­cess in com­bi­na­tion ther­a­pies could make the case for the val­ue of the CD47 path­way. Most bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies pulled back from us­ing CD47 af­ter Gilead had to halt a Phase 3 study over safe­ty con­cerns in 2022.

Plus, news about Ve­rastem On­col­o­gy, Ory­zon Ge­nomics, Az­i­tra, Vivory­on Ther­a­peu­tics and Ake­so:

Mer­ck cuts sev­er­al Phase 2 pro­grams: The com­pa­ny stopped work on two mid-stage pro­grams test­ing ex­per­i­men­tal mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies in com­bi­na­tion with Keytru­da: qua­von­limab in col­orec­tal can­cer, and boserolimab in ma­lig­nant neo­plasms. The cuts al­so in­clud­ed Phase 2 pro­grams for Lyn­parza in ad­vanced sol­id tu­mors and Welireg in breast, en­dome­tri­al, esophageal and he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar car­ci­no­ma. A Mer­ck spokesper­son said the de­ci­sions were “due to our rou­tine pipeline pri­or­i­ti­za­tion process.” — Nicole De­Feud­is

Vyne Ther­a­peu­tics dis­clos­es clin­i­cal hold: The com­pa­ny has been test­ing VYN202 for mod­er­ate-to-se­vere plaque pso­ri­a­sis in a Phase 1b tri­al. How­ev­er, the