Deals
In this episode of Denatured, Jennifer C. Smith-Parker speaks to Erik Digman Wiklund, CEO of Circio and Jacob Becraft, Co-founder and CEO of Strand Therapeutics. They discuss how post-COVID, emerging platforms like circular and logic circuit RNA are expanding the field’s therapeutic horizons.
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Henry Gosebruch, who has $3.5 billion in capital to deploy, is thinking broad as he steers the decades-old biotech out of years of turmoil.
Speaking on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Novo business development executive Tamara Darsow said the company is gunning for obesity and diabetes assets.
Buying vaccine biotech Dynavax was an easy choice for Sanofi despite anti-vaccine moves by the Trump administration.
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These deals radically reshaped the biopharma world, either by one vaccine rival absorbing another, a Big Pharma doubling down after another failed acquisition or, in the case of Pfizer and Novo, two heavyweights duking it out over a hot obesity biotech.
The star of the agreement targets a specific type of tau protein, helping to prevent toxic accumulation in the brain while also preserving the function of healthy tau.
Sanofi bought Dren’s DR-0201 program earlier this year for $600 million upfront and is running two Phase I trials in undisclosed inflammatory indications.
With $6 billion left in firepower, Pfizer is planning transactions in the hundreds of millions to the low-billions range, particularly in internal medicine and immunology and inflammation, Guggenheim reported.
Pfizer apparently had more in the tank after the high-profile battle to acquire Metsera earlier this fall. The company has licensed a new GLP-1 from YaoPharma.
What China is accomplishing in R&D “has implications for everyone playing in the R&D or innovation world,” McKinsey’s Fangning Zhang says.
The centerpiece of the deal is the in vivo editor TSRA-196, which in preclinical studies has shown robust editing at SERPINA1, the locus linked to alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.
At one point in merger negotiations with Novartis, Avidity CEO Sarah Boyce and her team walked, cutting off access to a data room and moving on to a capital raise.
The CRO market in the APAC region is thriving, particularly in China, due to intense clinical trial and innovation development, with Western investors and pharma leaning in.
Drug candidates don’t usually move among Big Pharma, but these five biotechs helped facilitate such hand-offs, scooping up assets from one pharma on the cheap before being bought out for billions by another.