Af­ter tak­ing a pair of tor­pe­does at the wa­ter­line last year, a list­ing Men­lo Ther­a­peu­tics $MN­LO is cast­ing its lot with Is­raeli der­ma­tol­ogy biotech Foamix $FOMX in a merg­er deal that’s care­ful­ly hedged against more fail­ures.

Foamix got a big — and much need­ed — boost a few weeks ago, when the FDA ap­proved its top­i­cal for­mu­la­tion of an an­tibi­ot­ic for ac­ne. And they just filed an NDA on an­oth­er minocy­cline take with an ap­pli­ca­tion for mod­er­ate-to-se­vere papu­lo­pus­tu­lar rosacea.

They’re com­bin­ing with a com­pa­ny that counts ser­lop­i­tant as the lead — and on­ly — drug in the pipeline. We last heard of that drug a year ago, when it failed a sec­ond tri­al fo­cused on chron­ic cough. Now they’re run­ning a piv­otal in pru­ri­tus, even though it failed the Phase II.

As of now, Foamix share­hold­ers come out of a post-merg­er com­pa­ny with 59% of the stock in what is a pure share swap. But if ser­lop­i­tant fails the first of 2 piv­otal stud­ies, their share goes up to 76%. A sec­ond fail­ure takes that to 82%.

Here are the near term cat­a­lysts they’re tout­ing to share­hold­ers.

• Com­mer­cial launch of Amzeeq an­tic­i­pat­ed in Jan­u­ary 2020
• Phase II clin­i­cal tri­al re­sults for ser­lop­i­tant for the treat­ment of CPUO in Jan­u­ary or Feb­ru­ary 2020
• Phase III clin­i­cal tri­al re­sults in the U.S. and Eu­rope for ser­lop­i­tant for the treat­ment of pru­ri­tus in PN in March or April 2020
• FMX103 PDU­FA ac­tion date of June 2, 2020
• Phase II clin­i­cal tri­al re­sults for FCD105 for treat­ment of mod­er­ate to se­vere ac­ne with top-line da­ta ex­pect­ed in mid-2020
• NDA sub­mis­sion, as­sum­ing Phase III suc­cess for ser­lop­i­tant for the treat­ment of pru­ri­tus in PN, in H2 2020

Men­lo’s stock hit a high north of $37 in the spring of 2018, then fell off a cliff as the on­ly egg in its bas­ket cracked un­der stress. Shares closed a lit­tle over $5 on Fri­day, rep­re­sent­ing a fall from grace that can’t be ex­cused by the break­through ther­a­py des­ig­na­tion they won on ser­lop­i­tant.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.