James Sabry’s BD team at Roche has a long track record in hunting the globe for new biotech deals. But they’ve never journeyed into China before to ink a worldwide development and commercialization pact with a China-based biotech on an experimental med.

Until this week.

As Max Gelman reported yesterday, Roche fronted a new alliance with China’s Jemincare with $60 million in cash and $590 million in milestones for worldwide commercial rights to an oral androgen receptor degrader. The deal itself is fairly typical of an early-stage alliance around a promising treatment. The Shanghai-based biotech is largely unknown outside China, but this is a classic high-risk, modest upfront pact that Roche routinely inks.

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These days in biotech, you never want to miss a chance to raise money for public companies. As much money as possible.

That survival strategy was in full view over the last 24 hours as Cerevel $CERE announced a major stock/debt raise, then upped the ante with a bigger debt load than initially planned.

The tally: $238 million – net — with a shot at boosting that to $274 million from the stock sale, provided the underwriters come back for more. And there’s $335 million from the debt, provided their first round buyers come back for an added bite. Rounding up, that’s $609 million with the add-on. Even without the add-ons, though, it’s still $530 million in the bank.

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Two of the most outspoken — and successful — drug developers in biotech say they’ve collected early-stage clinical data that are pointing them down the trail to the holy grail in cancer immunotherapy R&D.

While analysts largely busied themselves today with chronicling the ongoing success of Regeneron’s two big cash cows — Dupixent and Eylea — chief scientist George Yancopoulos and CEO Len Schleifer used the Q2 call to spotlight their early success with a combination of the “homegrown” PSMAxCD28 costimulatory bispecific antibody REGN5678 in combination with their PD-1 checkpoint Libtayo. The presentation comes just weeks after Regeneron completed a deal to gather all rights to the PD-1 that had been in Sanofi’s hands. And the two top execs are unstinting in their praise of the potential of a whole set of costimulatory pipeline projects which they say may finally deliver the long-awaited next-level approach to broadening the immunotherapy field of drugs.

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With Keytruda bulling its way past the $5 billion mark for Q2 sales, you could say that the top execs at Merck can be believed when they say how keenly interested they are in using its cash reserves for new M&A and licensing deals. Just don’t ask what they’re negotiating to buy right now.

The analysts largely tiptoed around the biggest buzz about Merck today: that it’s engaged in discussions to buy Seagen for $40 billion-plus. They’re a polite bunch that needs to be on a first-name basis with CEO Rob Davis. But Davis was willing to emphasize that the pharma giant has the means and the intent to do more deals.

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After Severin Schwan got the nod as the new CEO of Roche, it escaped no one’s attention that he had been steeped in Basel corporate culture since his professional career began as a trainee in corporate finance.

His successor — Thomas Schinecker — has been cut out of the exact same bolt of cloth.

No sooner had the Austrian completed his doctorate in molecular biology at NYU than he jumped into the management development program at Roche. And he’s had 19 years of steady advancement, leading to his current gig as head of the fast-growing diagnostics division, which anyone at Roche could tell you lies at the heart of its R&D strategy for advancing personalized meds to a first or best-in-class status.

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Mark Pruzanski spent more than 18 years growing Intercept from a startup to a commercial player looking for a landmark approval treating NASH. But 19 months after he stepped aside from his wounded biotech — after a CRL crushed its initial game plan for NASH — the longtime vet is getting up off the biotech board bench and getting back in the game, once again quarterbacking a startup that has some very familiar grand ambitions.

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