The fa­ther-and-son team at Mi­NA Ther­a­peu­tics is on a roll.

Just weeks af­ter snag­ging a $25 mil­lion up­front and a trea­sure map with close to $1.25 bil­lion in mile­stones from Eli Lil­ly, the phar­ma gi­ant is back with a $15 mil­lion eq­ui­ty sweet­en­er.

A qui­et play­er for the first decade of its ex­is­tence, Mi­NA Ther­a­peu­tics has been rack­ing up deals and dol­lars in the past 2 years. In ad­di­tion to the Lil­ly pact, As­traZeneca signed up with the Im­pe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don spin­out along with Servi­er.

Nagy Habib

As End­points News writer Ja­son Mast re­port­ed in May, the com­pa­nies have been lured by the re­search work that Nagy Habib has been do­ing on small ac­ti­vat­ing RNA: These strands func­tion sim­i­lar­ly to the small in­ter­fer­ing RNA that has turned Al­ny­lam in­to a $15 bil­lion com­pa­ny but in re­verse, not­ed Mast. In­stead of hi­jack­ing cel­lu­lar ma­chin­ery to turn the vol­ume down on a gene, they hi­jack it to turn the vol­ume way up.

If they play their saR­NA cards right, the biotech be­lieves it can com­pete as a ma­jor new play­er along­side RNAi or mR­NA.

Nagy Habib’s son, CEO Robert Habib, was al­ready talk­ing up the idea of rais­ing a new round for the com­pa­ny. Now they have a com­mit­ment from Lil­ly to help swell the fi­nal tal­ly, with the help of a ma­jor league en­dorse­ment for the plat­form play.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.