A few months af­ter its deal with Am­gen, San Diego-based biotech Plex­i­um has inked a deal with an­oth­er Big Phar­ma – this time, it’s Ab­b­Vie.

While Am­gen’s deal fo­cused on the can­cer space, Ab­b­Vie hopes to use Plex­i­um’s “ag­nos­tic” tar­get­ed pro­tein degra­da­tion (TPD) plat­form to screen for new ther­a­pies for neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases, Plex­i­um an­nounced to­day.

The deal in­cludes $35 mil­lion up­front and $530 mil­lion in down­stream mile­stones, along with fu­ture roy­al­ties for each of the five un­spec­i­fied tar­gets that Plex­i­um will be screen­ing for new ther­a­pies, Plex­i­um CEO Per­ci­val Bar­ret­to-Ko told End­points News.

TPD takes ad­van­tage of the body’s pre-ex­ist­ing pro­tein de­struc­tion sys­tem via “mol­e­c­u­lar glues” and mono­va­lent de­graders that help jump­start that de­struc­tion process, what Bar­ret­to-Ko says is “quite an el­e­gant ther­a­peu­tic ap­proach.” Plex­i­um’s high-through­put screen­ing plat­form, which Bar­ret­to-Ko em­pha­sizes doesn’t fo­cus on any sin­gle modal­i­ty, al­lows a “di­rect mea­sure of degra­da­tion,” he said.

With the Ab­b­Vie deal, Plex­i­um plans on putting that plat­form to work in neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases, fo­cus­ing on five tar­gets to be­gin with, though Bar­ret­to-Ko did not dis­close what those tar­gets were.

Start­ed in 2019, Plex­i­um is an emerg­ing play­er in the TPD space, which fea­tures many oth­er com­pa­nies in­clud­ing Kymera, Ly­cia, and C4 Ther­a­peu­tics.

Bar­ret­to-Ko notes that the Ab­b­Vie deal is “one of a tril­o­gy of events” for Plex­i­um, start­ing with their Am­gen deal as well as their $102 mil­lion fi­nanc­ing round from Soft­Bank just a few weeks af­ter.

“It’s no se­cret that the mar­ket has been very dif­fi­cult out there for a lot of dif­fer­ent biotech com­pa­nies,” Bar­ret­to-Ko said. How­ev­er, with their re­cent fi­nanc­ing and deals, “It not on­ly val­i­dates the plat­form and the pro­grams that we have … It al­lows us to head down and do the work we do best, and be thought­ful and in­tent­ful in terms of what po­ten­tial next steps we might con­sid­er.”

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”