An­ti-ag­ing com­pa­ny Hu­man Longevi­ty, found­ed by pi­o­neer­ing ge­nom­ic re­searcher Craig Ven­ter, is one step clos­er, po­ten­tial­ly, to be­com­ing a pub­lic com­pa­ny.

The start­up put out a press re­lease Mon­day af­ter­noon say­ing it has signed a “let­ter of in­tent” to re­verse merge with a SPAC run by for­mer Cred­it Su­isse CEO Tid­jane Thi­am, known as Free­dom Ac­qui­si­tion I Corp. If none of the SPAC in­vestors re­deem their shares and pull out at the float price of $10, Hu­man Longevi­ty will re­ceive $345 mil­lion.

Ven­ter’s for­mer com­pa­ny made sure to em­pha­size that Mon­day’s an­nounce­ment was far from a done deal, how­ev­er. Hu­man Longevi­ty made sev­er­al men­tions in its re­lease that there is no “as­sur­ance” the deal will go through. The en­ti­ties al­so did not file an SEC re­port, typ­i­cal­ly the stan­dard when an­nounc­ing a SPAC deal.

If the merg­er does take place, it will like­ly oc­cur in the third quar­ter this year and close in the first quar­ter of 2023, the com­pa­nies said. There was no in­for­ma­tion on a po­ten­tial PIPE fi­nanc­ing.

The Fi­nan­cial Times was the first to re­port that Ven­ter and Thi­am’s com­pa­nies were in SPAC merg­er dis­cus­sions.

Hu­man Longevi­ty got start­ed back in 2013 and of­fers ge­nom­ic se­quenc­ing and blood tests to clients, of­fer­ing per­son­al­ized meth­ods to fight ag­ing-re­lat­ed dis­eases. The com­pa­ny soon found it­self in a tu­mul­tuous pe­ri­od as Ven­ter was ac­cused of steal­ing trade se­crets as part of back-and-forth law­suits in 2018.

Though the com­pa­ny is seek­ing to raise $345 mil­lion through the re­verse-merg­er dance to Nas­daq, there’s no guar­an­tee it will do so giv­en the cur­rent mar­ket con­di­tions. Be­cause SPAC in­vestors don’t know the merg­er tar­get when they sign up, some re­tain the op­tion to take their mon­ey back out, with in­ter­est, at the SPAC’s IPO price — known as re­deem­ing shares.

With SPAC ac­tiv­i­ty falling from the pan­dem­ic-fu­eled boom of late 2020 and ear­ly 2021, Thi­am’s blank check com­pa­ny may see in­vestors re­deem their shares. Such a move would ring fa­mil­iar with the Sen­ti Bio SPAC con­sum­mat­ed ear­li­er this month, when the Tim Lu-run biotech net­ted on­ly $84.5 mil­lion of the $230 mil­lion avail­able in the SPAC trust, and $140.3 mil­lion over­all.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Free­dom Ac­qui­si­tion I Corp. has strug­gled to re­tain spon­sors, re­veal­ing in an SEC fil­ing this month that Pim­co, the world’s largest bond man­ag­er, gave up its SPAC stake. Pim­co was re­placed by an ad­vi­so­ry firm, Next G, af­fil­i­at­ed with Chi­nese en­tre­pre­neur Ed­ward Zeng.

The EMA is putting EU member states on alert over the shortage of two drugs that counter heart attacks due to an uptick in demand.

On Friday, the EMA sent out a warning that two Boehringer Ingelheim drugs are experiencing a shortage: Actilyse and Metalyse. The drugs are used as emergency treatments for adults experiencing acute myocardial infarction, or a heart attack, by dissolving blood clots that have formed in the blood vessels.

Fujifilm’s CDMO arm, Fujifilm Diosynth, has been on a roll this month as the company has recently broken ground on a major project in Europe and it appears to be keeping up the momentum.

Fujifilm Diosynth announced that it has kicked off an expansion project for its microbial manufacturing facility at its campus in the town of Billingham, UK, in the northeast of England.

The 20,000 square-foot, £400 million ($435 million) expansion will add clean rooms, purification suites and a packing area along with more space for the manufacturing itself.

Back in April, Amgen said it was encouraged by the solicitor general’s anticipated review of its Supreme Court petition to rehear a Repatha patent case. They’re likely much less optimistic about the outcome now.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a recent 27-page brief that Amgen’s arguments “lack merit and further review is not warranted.”

The case traces back to a suit filed in 2014 against Sanofi and Regeneron’s Praluent, which ended up beating Amgen’s PCSK9 blockbuster Repatha to market by a month just a year later.

At Klick Health’s first Ideas Exchange conference with biotech and pharma industry insiders since before the pandemic began, it was no surprise many conversations included Covid topics. Yet while vaccines and treatments were discussed, so too were the effects on drug development, federal responses, health inequities — and what to do now and next.

George Yancopoulos, chief scientist and cofounder of Regeneron, opened the conference responding to a question from Acorda CEO Ron Cohen about the spotlight on the industry during Covid and some of the “flak” biopharma has taken in the past.