Brent Saunders went on a tear of headline-blazing deals building Allergan, merging and rearranging a variety of big companies into one before an M&A pact with Pfizer blew up and sent him on a bout of biotech drug deals. That didn’t work so well, so under pressure, he got his buyout at AbbVie — which needed a big franchise like Botox. And it was no big surprise to see him riding the SPAC wave into a recent $1 billion-plus deal that left him in the executive chairman’s seat at an aesthetics outfit — now redubbed The Beauty Health Company — holding a big chunk of the equity.

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Right now one of the most interesting parlor games on Wall Street is offering odds on Biogen’s chances of getting an FDA OK on their controversial Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab.

For most objective players, it looks about like a coin toss, maybe a little worse than 50/50, as the Street balances the bull case of a full, mega blockbuster approval, a restricted approval or a disastrous order to go back to the clinic and mount a new Phase III. That last option was clearly the guidance most of the outside experts in the panel review offered the agency, as the industry is still puzzling out the question of whether or not the FDA is getting tougher in its oversight of drug development.

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While the wrangling over the relative safety of new, virally vectored Covid vaccines from J&J and AstraZeneca appears to be unending, analysts aren’t waiting around to see how the market will play out for the leaders.

As far as Bernstein’s Ronny Gal is concerned, the fight for market share in the developed world is over, and Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are the big winners, divvying up $38 billion in mega-blockbuster money.

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Murmurs of investors’ growing unease about GlaxoSmithKline’s struggling revival strategy spilled out into the public on Thursday as the Financial Times reported that activist hedge fund Elliott Management has built up a multibillion-pound stake in the pharma giant, portending a high profile showdown over CEO Emma Walmsley’s reign.

Shares had been down 14% since Walmsley became CEO and brought in Hal Barron to spur a makeover in the pipeline. Now, the FT reports, some of the unhappy investors are making unfavorable comparisons between Walmsley and Pascal Soriot, the CEO credited with a major turnaround at that other UK pharma giant — AstraZeneca.

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After spending the last decade building his rep as a biotech analyst at Jefferies, Biren Amin dropped word earlier in the week that he’s surfaced in a new job as CFO of a small, and still private, preclinical oncology biotech called Immuneering.

Amin has had plenty to say over the years about the oncology class of biotechs, a particularly hot property on Wall Street — especially during the boom IPO era we’ve been seeing in recent years. Now he’s making a flip over to a company where he’ll have a lot to say to insiders about the internal numbers.

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Roger Perlmutter will be doing some globetrotting for the next chapter in his long-running biopharma bio — though the actual travel part may be on hold through the pandemic.

Earlier in the week, we learned that Perlmutter, who stepped down from his post as head of R&D at the start of this year, has signed on as a science adviser to the Shanghai-based CBC group, a prominent investment group that’s been fostering some of the big new biotech startups in Asia.

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