Public Company Edition: Merging with a special purpose acquisition corporation may be an attractive alternative to an initial public offering, but February’s vigorous IPO pace includes seven recent offerings that raised $480.8m in the US. Also, Cassava raised $200m and KalVista brought in $222.5m.

IPO Edition: Sana leads the group with a $587.5m initial public offering, while Immunocore and Bolt follow with $200m-plus IPOs. The 10 newly public companies generated a 43.3% average return on 8 Feb.

NIH’s National Cancer Institute licensed two experimental cancer therapies in the past month to biopharma firms, leading a heavy slate of cancer-focused tech transfer deal-making.

BioNTech's $270m Series A round was the biggest start-up financing in January, but sizeable rounds also were raised by Centrexion ($67m), Eureka ($60m) and Pandion ($58m).