What a difference one really good Phase III readout and a couple of late-stage buyouts can make.

GSK CEO Emma Walmsley has been trying, hard, to build some excitement around the pipeline. And with the recent positive outcome for their RSV vaccine, she’s finally earning some market respect on that score. And with the big consumer split today, with the birth of Haleon, you can expect plenty of buzz about the need for another M&A deal to position the company.

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Merck CEO Rob Davis appears committed to pushing through with a $40 billion (or so) buyout deal with Seagen, driven by its need to be much more than Keytruda — and despite the likely FTC fight to come.

The Wall Street Journal has the latest play-by-play call of the private M&A talks, reporting overnight that Merck is in “advanced” discussions to buy Seagen at a share price north of $200. The deadline appears to be Merck’s Q2 call, set for July 28. That was good for another 5% spike on Seagen’s share price ahead of the bell, now right around $184 as investors consider the latest buzz.

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Biogen CEO Michel Vounatsos is departing under a dark and wide cloud created by the Aduhelm fiasco, which essentially destroyed any hope of any substantial return on sales. The new FDA chief believes that the controversial early OK of that drug has dinged the agency’s credibility, spurring some heavy criticism of the accelerated approval pathway among reformers in Congress. The amyloid hypothesis has been badly damaged. And the Phase III trial Biogen/Eisai are running on the follow-up Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab won’t read out until the fall.

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Little Sling Therapeutics out of Ann Arbor, MI may be just a few days out of the starting gate from the announcement of its $35 million launch round, but execs are positioning themselves within clear sight of a key clinical finish line. And they’re revving up with an experienced player to help guide them on the way.

The biotech is putting out word this morning that Faheem Hasnain has agreed to godfather the drug developer as chairman of the board, adding a measured dash of seasoning at a point when most biotechs are still struggling with the embryo stage.

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Some of the analysts at SVB Securities have been playing with the numbers that might set the stage for Merck $MRK — or some other Big Pharma — to come in and make a buyout of Seagen $SGEN work. And while it’s all pure speculation, it does help provide a rough outline for what a deal could look like in H2 as investors wait with bated breath for the bottom of a miserable public biotech market.

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Back at the beginning of the year during JP Morgan, I came up with my usual set of projections for the year ahead and definitely got one thing wrong. The biotech IPO market, I said in January, would remain weak, creating a major funding issue for biotech.

Here’s me in a discussion with Catalent executive chairman John Chiminski:

What you’ve had for several years is a booming biotech field, lots of money pummeling into the business and pushing it up. So when you remove IPOs as an alternative source of money for a lot of companies, it will make deal-making more (attractive).

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