Black­smith Med­i­cines and Forge Ther­a­peu­tics an­nounced Mon­day that the com­pa­nies are merg­ing on­ly a year af­ter Black­smith launched as a spin­out of Forge, but there is lit­tle in­for­ma­tion pro­vid­ed on the uni­fi­ca­tion.

The fo­cus will be on in­fec­tion and on­col­o­gy re­search to de­vel­op drugs to tar­get met­al­loen­zymes, or en­zyme pro­teins that con­tain a met­al ion like mag­ne­sium, zinc, iron, man­ganese, cal­ci­um, cobalt or cop­per and per­form a wide range of func­tions in the body from mi­to­chon­dr­i­al func­tion to ni­tric ox­ide pro­duc­tion. Met­al­loen­zymes ac­count for over 30% of all known en­zymes across all species.

“Our tar­get strat­e­gy is to fo­cus on met­al­loen­zymes of sig­nif­i­cant un­met need and high phar­ma in­ter­est, tar­gets with val­i­dat­ed bi­ol­o­gy that have been chal­leng­ing to drug due to chem­istry lim­i­ta­tions that we can solve with our plat­form,” Black­smith co-founder and CEO Zachary Zim­mer­man said in a state­ment.

Black­smith launched in Jan­u­ary 2021 with a po­ten­tial $300 mil­lion col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment with Eli Lil­ly to de­vel­op small mol­e­cule in­hibitors for met­al­loen­zymes, as well as a goal to ex­pand the reach of Forge’s tech plat­form in­to ar­eas out­side of an­ti-in­fec­tives. In­vestors in­clud­ed Evotec, Mag­naSci Ven­tures, MP Health­care Part­ners and Alexan­dria Ven­ture In­vest­ments.

What does Black­smith bring back to Forge’s ta­ble? Col­lab­o­ra­tions that could po­ten­tial­ly earn more than $800 mil­lion in mile­stone pay­ments and roy­al­ties and fed­er­al awards of up to $25.3 mil­lion for its in­fec­tious dis­ease pro­grams, as well as ex­ten­sive li­braries of met­al-bind­ing phar­ma­cophores and a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of the met­al­loen­zyme genome, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

Forge first an­nounced the BLACK­SMITH plat­form in 2017, with an ini­tial fo­cus on in­fec­tious dis­eases and met­al­loen­zymes.

The par­ent com­pa­ny has had its own suc­cess­es in the past few years. In 2019, Forge part­nered up with Basilea to dis­cov­er, de­vel­op, and com­mer­cial­ize an­tibi­otics as part of its fo­cus on drug re­sis­tance. Forge scored a $190.5 mil­lion re­search deal with Roche in 2020 that gave the Swiss drug­mak­er the op­tion to li­cense an ex­per­i­men­tal an­tibi­ot­ic be­ing de­vel­oped for use in se­ri­ous lung in­fec­tions.

Patient Square Capital, launched in 2020 by Jim Momtazee, has closed its first fund at $3.9 billion, it announced Wednesday morning.

According to Patient Square, it is the largest fund closed by a healthcare-focused firm. Momtazee, who founded and led the healthcare group for private equity giant KKR, left in 2019 to start Patient Square as a healthcare-specific firm, investing in biopharma, devices and diagnostics, providers, and tech services.

Roche announced another leadership shuffle Thursday morning – the head of global product strategy, Teresa Graham, will take over as CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals in March while the company’s corporate executive committee will make a spot for Levi Garraway, CMO and executive VP of global product development.

Thomas Schinecker will take over the top spot as Roche group CEO in March, leaving his spot as head of diagnostics.

FDA announced today that doctors and pharmacists can now prescribe Paxlovid to patients without a positive test for Covid-19.

CDER Director Patrizia Cavazzoni reissued Paxlovid’s authorization letter Wednesday, saying it has revised the authorization to “no longer require positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing.” The EUA now requires instead that adults and kids 12 years of age and older have a “current diagnosis of mild-to-moderate COVID-19.”

With Novo Nordisk’s obesity treatment Wegovy fully back in stock in December, sales are beginning to soar, the Danish pharma reported during its annual earnings call on Wednesday. Total scripts of the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) Wegovy topped 37,000 weekly in mid-January, a hockey stick uptick from end-of-year levels below 15,000 per week.

The new prescriptions come on top of the overall momentum of Novo obesity drug sales in 2022, although the then supply-constrained Wegovy was only part of that. Sibling obesity med Saxenda accounted for DKK 10.7 billion ($1.58 billion) of the total DKK 16.9 billion ($2.49 billion), or about 63%, in Novo Nordisk’s reported obesity segment sales.