John Maraganore and Dou­glas Fam­brough used to be at each oth­er’s throats as Al­ny­lam pur­sued claims that its RNAi ri­vals at Dicer­na had im­prop­er­ly pur­loined the IP it had picked up from Mer­ck in a bar­gain base­ment fire sale.

Dou­glas Fam­brough

But that was all set­tled up close to 2 years ago with a set­tle­ment from Dicer­na’s Fam­brough. And now the two are mov­ing ahead in a close R&D part­ner­ship that makes them col­lab­o­ra­tors on a cou­ple of key dis­ease tar­gets.

In the pact an­nounced this morn­ing, the 2 new al­lies will pool their re­spec­tive RNAi drugs for al­pha-1 liv­er dis­ease, let­ting Dicer­na move ahead on the de­vel­op­ment front to see whether 1, or both, should be ad­vanced through a piv­otal pro­gram. Dicer­na will foot the bill on that ef­fort while Al­ny­lam gains ex-US com­mer­cial rights to what­ev­er comes out the reg­u­la­to­ry side with a win.

Both of these drugs — ALN-AAT02 and DCR-A1AT — are in Phase I/II at the mo­ment.

That puts them be­hind Ar­row­head, which is in a Phase II/III piv­otal with their ri­val and start­ed dos­ing pa­tients in a small mid-stage study late last year fo­cused on pa­tient re­spons­es.

John Maraganore

Then Al­ny­lam and Dicer­na are cross-li­cens­ing drugs for pri­ma­ry hy­per­ox­aluria. That cov­ers Al­ny­lam’s lumasir­an tar­get­ing gly­co­late ox­i­dase for the treat­ment of PH type 1 and Dicer­na’s ne­dosir­an tar­get­ing lac­tate de­hy­dro­ge­nase A for the treat­ment of PH types 1, 2, and 3.

They each are of­fer­ing the oth­er a roy­al­ty stream on glob­al sales.

The al­liance shoves the old dis­pute in­to the his­to­ry books, rel­e­gat­ed now to a chap­ter on IP law­suits. Al­ny­lam had been up­set af­ter watch­ing Mer­ck staffers al­leged­ly make off with the IP they were buy­ing from the phar­ma gi­ant, on­ly to wind up at their ri­val. Dicer­na’s counter-claims spot­light­ed some com­pelling anec­dotes about how eas­i­ly re­search leaked out of Mer­ck af­ter the com­pa­ny de­cid­ed to punt their R&D flop.

Dicer­na claimed that Mer­ck ex­ec­u­tives prac­ti­cal­ly did every­thing but help car­ry suit­cas­es loaded with re­search out the door as they helped line up new jobs for the de­part­ing staffers. And their case de­tailed nu­mer­ous in­stances of just how help­ful they could be.

A couple years after licensing Novimmune’s emapalumab and turning around a quick FDA OK, Stockholm-based Sobi is betting up to $1.2 billion for rights to another rare disease drug.

The company is shelling out $250 million upfront and adding up to $915 million in milestones for rights to develop and commercialize Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ drug pegcetacoplan outside the US. Together, the companies will see the systemic C3 therapy through five registrational trials in hematology, nephrology and neurology.

The last four years have seen a sudden explosion in treatments for spinal muscular atrophy, a neurodegenerative condition that once led patients — often young ones — with a grim prognosis and no options. The prognosis still isn’t rosy, but now there are three FDA-approved options, enough to make the choice of one difficult.

Now a fourth potential option has entered the mix. Today, Scholar Rock announced the results from a proof-of-concept testing their SMA drug by itself and in combination with Ionis’ Spinraza, showing that all patient cohorts improved on standard scales used for measuring motor function in people with SMA.

Illumina is going to have a lot of work to do to prove Grail was worth those $8 billion.

Today, Exact Sciences announced that it will acquire Thrive, Grail’s chief rival among the early cancer detection startups, for a sizeable but relatively moderate $2.15 billion. The yawning gap in part reflects the vast differences in capital that have been invested to date in each company.  But both have gone toe-to-toe over the last year and a half, with Grail having published data in over 50 cancers but Thrive recently beating them to a key test for liquid biopsy companies.

Three years ago, Catabasis CEO Jill Milne and the crew insisted they had found good reason for great cheer once they plumbed the data from their failed study for the Duchenne MD drug edasalonexent. Plunging into the extended open-label data, they said, you could find solid evidence of efficacy. And that justified a try in Phase III.

But they were wrong.

Monday, after the bell, the little biotech acknowledged that their pivotal attempt following the mid-stage flop was another failure. The primary, change in baseline on the North Star Ambulatory Assessment, and the secondary on timed function tests both came up short of statistical significance.