Cin­Cor scored a $1.8 bil­lion buy­out deal with As­traZeneca ear­li­er this month, but ac­cord­ing to re­cent­ly re­leased doc­u­ments, it al­most walked away from the deal ta­ble with much more than that.

In Sep­tem­ber, As­traZeneca of­fered to buy Cin­Cor for $60 per share plus a con­tin­gent val­ue right of $6 per share, adding up to $3.2 bil­lion if all mile­stones had been achieved, ac­cord­ing to an SEC fil­ing pub­lished on Mon­day. How­ev­er, the Cin­Cor board and CEO Marc de Garidel want­ed to see more cash up­front.

De Garidel made a coun­terof­fer to As­traZeneca CEO Pas­cal So­ri­ot of $63 per share with­out a CVR the fol­low­ing day. So­ri­ot’s re­sponse? As­traZeneca was still in­ter­est­ed, but they’d need to see forth­com­ing da­ta from the com­pa­ny’s HA­LO tri­al in pa­tients with un­con­trolled hy­per­ten­sion be­fore mak­ing a fi­nal de­ci­sion.

On Nov. 28, Cin­Cor re­vealed that its lead drug bax­dro­stat failed the HA­LO tri­al, send­ing its stock price plum­met­ing near­ly 47%. A few weeks lat­er, As­traZeneca made an­oth­er (much low­er) of­fer: $22 per share, with a CVR of up to $10 per share, amount­ing to rough­ly $1.5 bil­lion, at a 164% pre­mi­um to Cin­Cor’s clos­ing price that day.

De Garidel told So­ri­ot that the of­fer was “in­suf­fi­cient,” ac­cord­ing to the fil­ing, and that the Cin­Cor board want­ed an up­front of­fer­ing of at least $30 per share. Af­ter more ne­go­ti­a­tion, the par­ties set­tled on $26 per share up­front, with a CVR of $10 per share that hinges on the “spec­i­fied reg­u­la­to­ry sub­mis­sion of a bax­dro­stat prod­uct.”

Bax­dro­stat, a re­vived Roche drug, is de­signed to block the pro­duc­tion of al­dos­terone, a hor­mone linked to in­creased blood pres­sure that’s long been of in­ter­est in the treat­ment of hy­per­ten­sion. How­ev­er, se­lec­tiv­i­ty has been a chal­lenge. If not care­ful enough, sci­en­tists run the risk of block­ing the pro­duc­tion of cor­ti­sol, which would counter the blood pres­sure-low­er­ing ef­fect of al­dos­terone re­duc­tion.

Topline re­sults from the Phase II BrigHTN tri­al showed that pa­tients with treat­ment-re­sis­tant hy­per­ten­sion on a 2 mg dose of bax­dro­stat saw an 11 mm Hg re­duc­tion in sys­tolic blood pres­sure com­pared to place­bo at week 12 (p<0.001), with no in­stances of adreno­cor­ti­cal in­suf­fi­cien­cy. That suc­cess sparked in­ter­est from a hand­ful of com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing As­traZeneca, how­ev­er the British phar­ma was the on­ly one to make a pro­pos­al.

De Garidel told End­points News ear­li­er this month that re­searchers saw a “very pro­found place­bo ef­fect” in the HA­LO study, and that some pa­tients may not have been tak­ing the drug as rec­om­mend­ed.

“Some­thing went wrong. In that study, the place­bo arm was much, much, much greater than nor­mal,” he said. “These are things that we are cur­rent­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ing.”

As­traZeneca al­so of­fered to buy Cin­Cor for $700 mil­lion up­front with $400 mil­lion in mile­stones back in De­cem­ber 2021, be­fore the com­pa­ny’s IPO — an of­fer that the board deemed “in­ad­e­quate” at the time, ac­cord­ing to the doc­u­ments.

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.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.

Sanofi expects its RSV antibody jointly developed with AstraZeneca will be available next season, executive VP of vaccines Thomas Triomphe announced on the company’s quarterly call.

Beyfortus, also known as nirsevimab, was approved in the EU back in November and is currently under FDA review with an expected decision coming in the third quarter of this year. The news comes as the FDA plans to hold advisory committee meetings over the next couple months to review RSV vaccines from Pfizer and GSK.

After a whopping $4 billion asset buy from Nimbus Therapeutics, along with a $400 million deal with Hutchmed for a colorectal cancer drug, Takeda executives touted pipeline optimism on its latest earnings call this week.

That’s because the TYK2 inhibitor for psoriasis Takeda is getting from Nimbus, along with the Hutchmed fruquintinib commercialization outside of China, are just two of what it reports are 10 late-stage development programs of promising candidates.