Af­ter tak­ing sev­er­al months to re­view F-star’s pro­posed sale to a Chi­nese com­pa­ny, the US gov­ern­ment’s Com­mit­tee on For­eign In­vest­ment in the Unit­ed States (CFIUS) has fi­nal­ly giv­en its bless­ing for the deal.

The clear­ance comes al­most nine months af­ter in­voX Phar­ma, a sub­sidiary of Chi­na’s Sino Bio­pharm, first struck a deal to buy out F-star for $161 mil­lion in cash.

CFIUS is a long­stand­ing group tasked with scru­ti­niz­ing trans­ac­tions in­volv­ing for­eign in­vest­ments in the US and block­ing any deals it deems threat­en­ing. But in re­cent years, the White House has sig­naled that biotech could be a top area for crack­down, trig­ger­ing fears that it would cre­ate road­blocks for Asian in­vestors in­ter­est­ed in US com­pa­nies.

Thanks to the re­view, the com­pa­nies have ex­tend­ed the of­fer pe­ri­od mul­ti­ple times. In De­cem­ber, CFIUS went as far as to put the buy­out on hold, cit­ing “un­re­solved na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty risks.”

F-star sug­gest­ed a month lat­er that to­geth­er with in­voX, it was ne­go­ti­at­ing a “mit­i­ga­tion agree­ment” to ad­dress CFIUS’ con­cerns.

Once a high fly­er in UK biotech, F-star makes bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies de­signed to trig­ger more spe­cif­ic im­mune ac­ti­va­tion against can­cer. While it boast­ed siz­able deals with Bris­tol My­ers Squibb and lat­er Mer­ck KGaA, it was in dire need of cash to pay off its debt and stay afloat. Sino Bio­pharm, which was look­ing to ex­pand its over­seas pres­ence, of­fered ex­act­ly that.

With the fi­nal hur­dle cleared, the deal is all but sealed as 70% of the F-star stock has al­ready been ten­dered, ac­cord­ing to a press re­lease, and it on­ly needs more than 50%. The ten­der of­fer is sched­uled to ex­pire on Wednes­day.

Shares of F-star $FSTX rose more than 16% to $7.11.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Liverpool may be known for rock and roll and premier league football, but the China-based contract manufacturer Pharmaron is looking to make it a bigger hub for cell and gene therapy manufacturing.

As part of Pharmaron’s further commitment to Merseyside county, it plans to build an 8,000-square-meter facility, or around 86,000 square feet, which includes a boost to the manufacturing capacity of 3,500 square meters, or 37,600 square feet. The price tag for the expansion will be £151 million ($186 million), with Pharmaron receiving a grant from the UK Government’s Life Sciences Innovation Manufacturing Fund (LSIMF).