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.

By Mwango Kashoki, MD, MPH, Vice President-Technical, and Richard Macaulay, Senior Director, of Parexel Regulatory & Access

In recent years, we’ve seen a significant uptake in the use of regulatory options by companies looking to accelerate the journey of life-saving drugs to market. In 2018, 73% of the novel drugs approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) were designated under one or more expedited development program categories (Fast Track, Breakthrough Therapy, Priority Review, and Accelerated Approval).ᶦ

As the world becomes increasingly dependant on Asia for the ingredients of its medicines, Sanofi sees business to be done in Europe.

The French drugmaker said it’s creating the world’s second largest active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) manufacturer by spinning out its six current sites into a standalone company: Brindisi (Italy), Frankfurt Chemistry (Germany), Haverhill (UK), St Aubin les Elbeuf (France), Újpest (Hungary) and Vertolaye (France). They have mapped out €1 billion in expected sales by 2022 and 3,100 employees for the new operations headquartered in France.

SoftBank has found its newest biotech investment.

The Japanese bank has invested $165 million into Karius, a company that uses blood tests to diagnose infectious diseases, as part of its new Vision Fund 2. The full scope of the new fund has yet to be announced, but the first and newly-beleaguered Vision Fund poured $100 billion into technology companies, including the biotechs Vir Biotechnology and Roivant and the sequencing company 10x Genomics.

An experimental drug that promises to be the first anti-infective agent to prove superior to vancomycin — an antibiotic approved in 1958 — has notched the FDA’s “breakthrough” status.

ContraFect said the designation was based on Phase II data in which exebacase was tested against a superbug known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA. In a subgroup analysis, the clinical responder rate at day 14 was 42.8% higher than that among those treated with standard of care, the company said (p=0.010).

For two months, as the novel coronavirus swelled from a few early cases tied to a Wuhan market to a global epidemic, most of the world’s focus and dollars have flowed toward emergency initiatives: building vaccines at a record pace, plucking experimental antivirals out of freezers to see what sticks and immunizing mice for new antibodies.

Now a new and well-funded collaboration between Harvard and a top Chinese research institute will play the long game. In a 5-year, $115 million initiative backed by China Evergrande Group, researchers from the Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Guangzhou Institute for Respiratory Health will study the virus in an effort to develop therapies against infections by the novel coronavirus, known as SARS–CoV-2, and to prevent new ones.

Zoetis forked over $85 million in 2017 to acquire Nexvet Biopharma and its pipeline of monoclonal antibodies. Juergen Horn, Nexvet’s former chief product development officer, has now secured $15 million for his own biologic company for animals: Invetx.

Buoyed by emerging advances in gene therapies for humans, scientists have started looking at harnessing the technology for animals setting up companies such as Penn-partnered Scout Bio and George Church-founded Rejuvenate Bio. But akin to Nexvet, Invetx is working on leveraging the time-tested science of monoclonal antibodies to treat chronic diseases that afflict man’s best friend.

As the coronavirus originating out of Wuhan spreads to South Korea, Italy and Iran, stoking already intense fears of a pandemic, GlaxoSmithKline has found another pair of trusted hands to place its adjuvant system. China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals will add the adjuvant to its preclinical, protein-based vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2.

Clover, which is based in the inland city of Chengdu, boasts of a platform dubbed Trimer-Tag that produces covalently-trimerized fusion proteins. Its candidate, COVID-19 S-Trimer, resembles the viral spike (S)-protein found in the virus.