Hema­tol­ogy-fo­cused Disc Med­i­cine has agreed to pay a $10 mil­lion down pay­ment to Mab­well Ther­a­peu­tics to de­vel­op and com­mer­cial­ize a port­fo­lio of mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies for blood dis­or­ders.

It’s the first deal Disc has made since it went pub­lic in Au­gust.

The ini­tial $10 mil­lion is a small piece of a po­ten­tial $412.5 mil­lion of mile­stone pay­ments and roy­al­ties of “close to two dig­it per­cent­age” of net sales. Disc will have rights in the US, Eu­rope and oth­er un­named ter­ri­to­ries out­side of Chi­na and South­east Asia. The mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies tar­get trans­mem­brane ser­ine pro­tease 6.

One of the can­di­dates in­clud­ed in the deal is MWTX-003, a mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body in­jec­tion for a rare blood dis­or­der and blood can­cer. It’s known as 9MW3011 out­side of the US.

Ac­cord­ing to Mab­well, there are no “ma­ture and ef­fec­tive” macro­mol­e­c­u­lar drugs for its po­ten­tial tar­get in­di­ca­tions: be­ta tha­lassemia, an in­her­it­ed blood dis­or­der, and poly­cythemia ve­ra, a type of blood can­cer. The drug works by con­trol­ling iron lev­els to treat hema­to­log­ic dis­or­ders.

The FDA ap­proved the can­di­date for an IND in No­vem­ber, and the plan is to start a Phase I tri­al in healthy vol­un­teers in the sec­ond half of 2023.

Disc has tak­en over the port­fo­lio as its first deal af­ter the com­pa­ny went pub­lic via a re­verse merg­er with Gem­i­ni Ther­a­peu­tics. Disc is now trad­ing un­der the stock sym­bol $IRON, in ref­er­ence to Disc’s line­up of ther­a­pies for blood iron dis­or­ders.

Along with the merg­er, Disc se­cured $53.5 mil­lion in a fi­nanc­ing round in Au­gust on top of the $90 mil­lion Se­ries B it raised in Sep­tem­ber 2021.

Al­so in Au­gust last year, Disc start­ed a Phase II tri­al in Aus­tralia for its for­mer Roche drug, bitop­er­tin, that flopped in its pre­vi­ous in­di­ca­tion of schiz­o­phre­nia, in­stead look­ing at two rare blood dis­eases — ery­thro­poi­et­ic pro­to­por­phyr­ia and X-linked pro­to­por­phyr­ia. The com­pa­ny is now plan­ning ad­di­tion­al stud­ies for the drug in Di­a­mond-Black­fan ane­mia.

Disc has an ane­mia drug in its pipeline, DISC-0974, li­censed from Ab­b­Vie in 2019. The com­pa­ny start­ed a Phase Ib/II study in pa­tients with myelofi­bro­sis ane­mia in 2022 and is plan­ning ad­di­tion­al stud­ies for ane­mia linked to chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.

Over the past several years, Massachusetts-based contractor Charles River Laboratories has been busy on the M&A front, with the latest, $50 million buyout coming Monday for a provider of high-throughput screening solutions for discovery research.

Chicago-based SAMDI Tech will now be folded into Charles River’s discovery and safety assessment division, Charles River announced.

The $50 million in cash is for the 80% of SAMDI that Charles River didn’t previously own. Other financial details on the deal were not disclosed.