Joshua Smi­ley Lil­ly

By de­liv­er­ing the on­ly M&A news in a rel­a­tive­ly mut­ed deal scene at JP Mor­gan, Eli Lil­ly dis­tin­guished it­self as an ac­tive buy­er right at the start of the year. And, ac­cord­ing to its CFO, you can ex­pect more to come in the year ahead.

Lil­ly kicked off the an­nu­al con­fab — prime time for Big Phar­ma play­ers to stake their claims in key ar­eas — on the Fri­day be­fore the ac­tion got go­ing in San Fran­cis­co with the an­nounce­ment that it’s bag­ging Der­mi­ra for $1.1 bil­lion. The biotech had a com­mer­cial prod­uct and a suite of pre­clin­i­cal der­ma­tol­ogy pro­grams, but the crown jew­el was un­doubt­ed­ly the late-stage IL-13 drug le­brik­izum­ab.

Josh Bilenker

“We are look­ing at Der­mi­ra-like op­por­tu­ni­ties tar­get­ing as­sets in the $1 bil­lion to $5 bil­lion range,” Lil­ly CFO Josh Smi­ley told Reuters. “We’d like to be do­ing some­thing in the range of one per quar­ter or so.”

Not all of them would have to be near­ing the fin­ish line as le­brik­izum­ab was. In fact, Smi­ley added that he sees the most op­por­tu­ni­ty in ear­li­er stages of de­vel­op­ment — and they have an ap­petite for a range of deal struc­tures from li­cens­ing to ac­qui­si­tions to any­thing in be­tween. Drugs for pain, im­munol­o­gy and neu­rol­o­gy are of high in­ter­est.

His com­ments echo sim­i­lar strate­gies laid out by Josh Bilenker, the for­mer chief of Loxo who’s now in charge of all things on­col­o­gy at Lil­ly af­ter the phar­ma gi­ant bought out his start­up for $8 bil­lion last Jan­u­ary.

Daniel Skovron­sky Lil­ly

“There’s al­ways ap­petite in phar­ma to do that: If there’s an as­set that’s in­ter­est­ing, go get it,” Bilenker said on a pan­el host­ed by End­points days ago. “As the sec­ondary fol­low on fi­nanc­ing mar­ket soft­ens, I think the lever­age shifts a bit to the abil­i­ty to trans­act on an as­set lev­el ba­sis.”

Lil­ly has spot­light­ed on­col­o­gy as an R&D pri­or­i­ty as it bat­tles height­ened scruti­ny on in­sulin pric­ing and fights for a place in oth­er crowd­ed spaces such as mi­graine, rheuma­toid arthri­tis and pso­ri­a­sis. Dan Skovron­sky, the CSO, has al­so cham­pi­oned a re­newed fo­cus on Alzheimer’s, where the phar­ma gi­ant suf­fered a painful re­treat af­ter the high-pro­file fail­ure of solanezum­ab.

Six months after launching his first biotech SPAC, Foresite’s Jim Tananbaum has started a second. On Tuesday, the longtime life science investor filed to raise $100 million by selling 10 million shares of the blank check company FS development II.

It’s a quick return to Wall Street for Foresite, although other firms have moved quicker. Perceptive Advisors raised a $130 million SPAC in June and were back before the end of July to raise another $125 million. By that point, the firm was evidently nearing a deal for the June SPAC, which would announce a half-billion-dollar merger with Cerevel Therapeutics on July 30.

Hours before President Biden’s Covid-19 team gave their first virtual press conference, the famed AIDS researcher David Ho delivered concerning news in a new pre-print: SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351, the variant that emerged in South Africa, is “markedly more resistant” to antibodies from convalescent plasma and vaccinated individuals.

The news for several monoclonal antibodies, including Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab, was even worse: Their ability to neutralize was “completely or markedly abolished,” Ho wrote. Lilly’s antibody cocktail, which was just shown to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalizations or death, also became far less potent.