Moderna’s little business deal with Autolus earlier this week looks like a predinner snack ahead of the main course to come.

During his Q2 call with analysts on Thursday, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel got more than a few eyebrows to raise with his comments on BD plans. Now that the company’s market cap has hit an Everest-high cruising altitude above $165 billion — levitating up 78% in the past month — with a megablockbuster ginning money on hand, Bancel is prepared to put that cash and kind to use. And he made it clear that gene editing/gene therapies are right at the heart of this new move.

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Tillman Gerngross doesn’t waffle.

The longtime Dartmouth professor and Adimab founder tends to pick a course and drive straight for the goal. If he sees a big, ugly nail, he’ll start to design a hammer for it. And jumping straight into the global pandemic, he quickly decided that he had the best shot at producing a powerful antibody that could protect billions of people from the worst public health crisis in a century.

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Right now, investments in biotech are continuing to flow at record levels, with IPOs booming and VCs continuing to invest from a fat round of new funds. But they’re definitely stealing all the thunder from an anemic set of deals and a quiet M&A scene where most big players have been sitting it out.

Chris Dokomajilar, the numbers maestro at DealForma, broke down the most recent set of numbers for us. You can see what the trends are in the charts below. Here’s his take on the key points:

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The storm of controversy that broke over the FDA’s decision to provide an accelerated approval for aducanumab proved contentious on several levels. And near the top of the list was the FDA’s liberal allowance of a 9-year timeline for Biogen to complete a confirmatory study of the suspect therapy that flat failed one of its Phase IIIs.

One of the favorite stats execs in the industry like to cite is an average of 10 years and a billion dollars to develop a drug — early start to FDA OK finish — though that number is typically wildly variable from program to program. But not even the most generous timelines would include 9 years for a confirmatory study.

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Biogen has earned two powerful critics in the House of Representatives as the storm of controversy that surrounds their experimental Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab now moves to Congress.

Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, announced late Friday that their committees would put a spotlight on the FDA’s decision to hand Biogen a megablockbuster accelerated approval based on a selection of data from conflicting clinical studies.

The language in their statement makes it crystal clear that they have some pointed questions for the regulators — led by FDA interim chief Janet Woodcock — about the broad-label OK that puts the drug in front of millions of desperate Alzheimer’s patients for $56,000, a price which will be amplified by related procedures to monitor patients:

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Late on Friday, as the biopharma industry in the US was making a rush to the exits for a 3-day weekend, BridgeBio put out word that the FDA had come through on a critical first OK for QED, one of their many subs pushing a drug through clinical development. The agency offered an accelerated approval for Truseltiq (infigratinib), a new therapy for cases of cholangiocarcinoma harboring an FGFR2 fusion or rearrangement.

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