Mergers & acquisitions
Merck has made a $9.2 billion play for Cidara, and there’s another bidding war afoot, this one for sleep biotech Avadel. Meanwhile, Rick Pazdur has taken the helm at CDER while tensions run high between FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Health Secretary RFK Jr.
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.
Halda Therapeutics is developing oral assets for prostate and lung cancer. The deal comes after Johnson & Johnson set an ambitious goal for its oncology sales by 2030.
A day after Pfizer closed its hotly contested Metsera deal, Lundbeck has made an unsolicited offer to steal Avadel Pharmaceuticals away from Alkermes.
At $9.2 billion, the Cidara acquisition lands among the top 5 largest deals of the year.
Speaking at a conference this morning, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla suggested that Metsera’s therapies could begin hitting the market in 2028.
While most BioSpace LinkedIn poll respondents believe the job market won’t improve until at least 2027, two industry experts are optimistic a turnaround could start sooner. They discuss early signals of recovery and challenges that remain.
In 2025, landmark obesity drug deals, China’s biotech surge, and AI’s deeper integration into pharma operations drove a year of transformation and renewed momentum for life sciences.
Pfizer seals the deal with Metsera for $10 billion after Novo Nordisk bowed out; President Donald Trump welcomes executives from Novo and Eli Lilly to the White House to announce that the companies’ GLP-1 medicines would be sold at a reduced cost; and the FDA grants the second round of priority review vouchers—primarily to already marketed drugs.
MeiraGTx Holdings is licensing a genetic eye disease medicine to Eli Lilly in a deal worth up to $475 million.
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