Three years ago shares of NewLink Ge­net­ics trav­eled at a lofty al­ti­tude above $50 a share, with some high hopes rid­ing on IDO. Now those hopes have been thor­ough­ly quashed, along with the shares, with a minia­tur­ized mar­ket cap of $59 mil­lion and a stock price of $1.59. The com­pa­ny founder, Charles Link, left a cou­ple of months ago. 

And that makes it a fit ve­hi­cle for a re­verse merg­er.

Charles Link

That’s what Lu­mos Phar­ma thinks. This morn­ing the com­pa­ny said that they would merge in­to the pub­lic biotech, with a 50/50 share go­ing to in­vestors at each. When it’s over ear­ly next year, they’ll re­name the com­pa­ny Lu­mos and trade as $LU­MO.

The com­pa­ny plans to keep op­er­a­tions in Austin and Ames, Iowa, where NewLink has done its work. But it will fo­cus pri­mar­i­ly on LUM-201, which it hopes to make in­to “the world’s first oral ther­a­peu­tic for pe­di­atric growth hor­mone de­fi­cien­cy.” A Phase IIb is due to open up in the mid­dle of next year, with two oth­er in­di­ca­tions in the pipeline. And that’s it, for now.

Stine Seed Farm, the biggest in­vestor in NewLink, signed off on the deal, along with Lu­mos in­vestors: Deer­field Man­age­ment, a fund man­aged by Black­stone Life Sci­ences, Roche Ven­ture Fund, New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates (NEA), and San­té Ven­tures. 

A couple years after licensing Novimmune’s emapalumab and turning around a quick FDA OK, Stockholm-based Sobi is betting up to $1.2 billion for rights to another rare disease drug.

The company is shelling out $250 million upfront and adding up to $915 million in milestones for rights to develop and commercialize Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ drug pegcetacoplan outside the US. Together, the companies will see the systemic C3 therapy through five registrational trials in hematology, nephrology and neurology.

Illumina is going to have a lot of work to do to prove Grail was worth those $8 billion.

Today, Exact Sciences announced that it will acquire Thrive, Grail’s chief rival among the early cancer detection startups, for a sizeable but relatively moderate $2.15 billion. The yawning gap in part reflects the vast differences in capital that have been invested to date in each company.  But both have gone toe-to-toe over the last year and a half, with Grail having published data in over 50 cancers but Thrive recently beating them to a key test for liquid biopsy companies.

EQRx is paying top dollar to bring a pair of PD-(L)1 drugs into its portfolio of fast-follow therapies, offering $150 million upfront in what could shape up to be a $1.3 billion alliance with China’s CStone.

As early as 2017 Celgene had bet on a made-in-China PD-1 via its pact with BeiGene, quickly followed by Arcus as the second checkpoint wave was looming; more recently Eli Lilly imported longtime partner Innovent’s PD-1 in a $1 billion deal. All are diving into a space now dominated by Merck’s Keytruda franchise, where six other players are trying to catch up by carving out their own niches — and more are on their way to tap into the various I/O pairings anchored by a PD-(L)1. But none so far has quite shared EQRx’s explicit mission to disrupt the multibillion-dollar market by offering a lower cost option.

The last four years have seen a sudden explosion in treatments for spinal muscular atrophy, a neurodegenerative condition that once led patients — often young ones — with a grim prognosis and no options. The prognosis still isn’t rosy, but now there are three FDA-approved options, enough to make the choice of one difficult.

Now a fourth potential option has entered the mix. Today, Scholar Rock announced the results from a proof-of-concept testing their SMA drug by itself and in combination with Ionis’ Spinraza, showing that all patient cohorts improved on standard scales used for measuring motor function in people with SMA.