Big Phar­ma just struck its sec­ond dis­tri­b­u­tion deal with the grow­ing glob­al med­ical mar­i­jua­na busi­ness.

Nine months af­ter No­var­tis’ San­doz group al­lied it­self with Tilray, the med­ical cannabis grow­er Can­ndoc says it will use Te­va’s SLE group to dis­trib­ute its med­ical cannabis prod­ucts in Is­rael, and then spear­head the glob­al dis­tri­b­u­tion of its prod­ucts to mar­kets around the world where med­ical cannabis is le­gal.

“Through its SLE part­ner­ship, Can­ndoc has aligned it­self with one of the most promi­nent phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies in the world, for the dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis-based med­ical treat­ments to coun­tries that rec­og­nize the val­ue of these med­i­cines for peo­ple in need,” not­ed com­pa­ny chair­man Ehud Barak in a state­ment.

Barak is the for­mer prime min­is­ter of Is­rael, un­der­scor­ing just how deeply en­trenched the com­pa­ny is with the coun­try’s busi­ness es­tab­lish­ment. Back in April, Haaretz re­port­ed that Can­ndoc was do­ing a road­show for an IPO on Nas­daq and talk­ing up its shot at a uni­corn val­u­a­tion of around $5 bil­lion.

But the bloom has come off the mar­ket rose, with share prices at the top play­ers like Tilray wilt­ing as the overnight mar­ket bub­ble that grew up around mar­i­jua­na quick­ly de­flat­ed. Share prices may be down, but Te­va and No­var­tis clear­ly see some longterm po­ten­tial in med­ical mar­i­jua­na. And more of their col­leagues in the busi­ness may well fol­low.

Can­ndoc is a sub­sidiary of In­ter­Cure and has cul­ti­va­tion sites in Is­rael as well as JVs un­der­way for cul­ti­va­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion in the EU and Cana­da. In­ter­Cure al­so has mi­nor­i­ty stakes in 2 biotech com­pa­nies, Re­gen­era and Nov­el­lus.

Fabrice Chouraqui’s career has taken some big twists along his life journey. He got his PharmD at Université Paris Descartes and jumped into the drug development game for a bit. Then he took a sharp turn and went back to school to get his MBA at Insead before returning to pharma on the commercial side.

Twenty years later, after steadily rising through the ranks and journeying the globe to nab a top job as president of US pharma for the Basel-based Novartis, Chouraqui exited in another career switch. And now he’s headed into a hybrid position as a CEO-partner at Flagship, where he’ll take a shot at leading Cellarity — one of the VC’s latest paradigm-changing companies of the groundbreaking model that aspires to deliver a new platform to the world of drug R&D.

Another day, another win for Enhertu.

The antibody-drug conjugate AstraZeneca promised up-to $7 billion to partner on has had a quite a few months, beginning with splashy results in a Phase II breast cancer trial, a rapid approval and, earlier this month, breakthrough designations in both non-small cell lung cancer and gastric cancer.

Now, at ASCO, the British pharma and their Japanese partner, Daiichi Sankyo, have shown off the data that led to the gastric cancer designation, which they’ll take back to the FDA. In a pivotal, 187-person Phase II trial, Enhertu shrunk tumors in 42.9% of third-line patients with HER2-positive stomach cancer, compared with 12.5% in a control arm where doctors prescribed their choice of therapy. Progression-free survival was 5.4 months for Enhertu compared to 3.5 months for the control.

Back in 2016, when then-Shire CEO Flemming Ørnskov picked up a promising clinical-stage IBD drug from Pfizer, the Boston-based biotech dubbed it SHP647 and moved it into the gem section of the pipeline, with rosy expectations of registration-worthy Phase III data ahead.

This was a drug that the EC wanted Takeda to commit to selling off before it gave their blessing to its acquisition of Shire, to settle some deep-seated concerns revolving around the potential market overlap with their blockbuster rival Entyvio. And Takeda, which took on a heavy debt load to buy Shire, clearly wanted the cash to pay down debt.