How do you pull off one of the most lucrative biotech turnarounds in history?

You begin, it seems, by calling up the chief business officer of a Big Pharma sitting beneath a $30 billion-plus windfall and asking if he might want to get in on a modest investment in an up-and-coming company.

At least that’s what Trillium CEO Jan Skvarka asked Pfizer global business vice president John DeYoung in early summer 2021. Trillium was valued at a couple of shades under $1 billion at the time, an astronomical valuation from the penny stock mire it sat at when Skvarka arrived in October 2019.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

We will be off Monday in observance of Memorial Day — and when we get back, it will be a straight march to ASCO, BIO and more. Enjoy the (long) weekend!

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Rich Horgan’s quest to create a custom gene therapy for his brother, Terry, ended in tragedy. But Horgan doesn’t believe it’s the end of the story.

Terry, a 27-year-old patient with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died last October just eight days after receiving the therapy in a clinical trial in which he was the only participant. The case raised questions about the safety of certain gene therapies and what would happen to other drug programs under a nonprofit that Horgan created, called Cure Rare Disease.

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Even in a down year for much of the biopharma market, 20 CEOs brought in pay packages valued at more than $20 million, an Endpoints News analysis found.

Endpoints collected data on more than 350 CEO compensation packages, covering a wide range of pharma, biotech, and life sciences companies. All told, the 20 largest earners made over $725 million in 2022 — an average package of $36.4 million. Three brought in paydays over $50 million, and one CEO broke the $100 million mark.

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Mirati Therapeutics’ path to a second drug approval will likely have to wait. The San Diego biotech company said Wednesday that its investigational lung cancer drug failed a Phase III trial testing it in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo.

The drug, sitravatinib, and Opdivo weren’t better than the chemo drug docetaxel at keeping patients alive, Mirati said in a press release. The spectrum-selective kinase inhibitor missed the primary goal of overall survival in patients with second- or third-line advanced non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer.

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This year’s list of 20 biotech leaders under the age of 40 includes a huge range of ambitions. Some of our honorees are planning to create the next big drug giant. Others are pushing the bounds of AI. One is working to revolutionize TB testing. All are compelling talents who are still young in age, but already far along in achievement.

And, as in years past, we went over. The 20 are actually 22 because of two double profiles that reflect how important teamwork is in the industry. As one of our honorees, Joe Illingworth of DJS Antibodies, told me in our interview, “It takes a village to raise a biotech.”

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The government’s waiting period for Merck’s $10.8 billion Prometheus Biosciences buyout expired on Monday, meaning the companies can proceed to close the deal, according to an SEC filing.

Prometheus announced the merger last month after fielding interest from several other pharma companies, including AbbVie and Bristol Myers Squibb, according to a Bloomberg report. It gives Merck PRA023, an experimental anti-TL1A antibody for inflammatory bowel disease that Merck expects will play a big role in its future beyond Keytruda’s patent cliff.

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The FDA on Friday approved Lexicon’s heart failure drug sotagliflozin following a string of setbacks for the pharma company, including an FDA rejection in diabetes and the loss of a development deal with Sanofi.

The dual SGLT1 and SGLT2 inhibitor will be marketed as Inpefa and is a once-daily tablet. It’s been approved to reduce the risk of cardiovascular death and heart failure-related hospitalization or urgent visits in adults with heart failure or type 2 diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease, and other cardiovascular risk factors. The label spans the range of left ventricular ejection fraction, including preserved ejection fraction and reduced ejection fraction, as well as patients with or without diabetes, Lexicon said Friday.

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Pyxis Oncology, the public Boston biotech breathing life into Pfizer’s antibody-drug conjugates platform, will buy Apexigen, a small oncology outfit that went public in a blank-check deal just last summer. Meanwhile, CMO Jay Feingold will leave next month.

For $16 million, via an all-stock deal that will see Apexigen shareholders own about 10% of the combined company, Pyxis gets access to an antibody discovery platform and a Phase II CD40 agonist. Apexigen was an early darling at AACR in 2019 with sotigalimab and followed that up with a $123 million Series C in March 2020. But the California biotech would eventually raise much less in a flip onto the public markets for $19 million last August.

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