Mem­bers of the Sack­ler fam­i­ly caught up in thou­sands of law­suits tar­get­ing them and Pur­due Phar­ma for their in­volve­ment in the opi­oid epi­dem­ic have agreed to hand over $4.3 bil­lion of their for­tune in ex­change for be­ing left off the hook of lit­i­ga­tion.

That fig­ure marks a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease over the $3 bil­lion that had been on of­fer, and it was im­me­di­ate­ly at­tacked by a host of crit­ics who be­lieve they should be re­quired to give up much, much more af­ter prof­it­ing from the reck­less dis­tri­b­u­tion of Oxy­Con­tin. The opi­oid epi­dem­ic is re­spon­si­ble for the deaths of hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple.

The bank­rupt­cy plan filed late Mon­day in­cludes an of­fer of $500 mil­lion from Pur­due, with more mon­ey to fol­low as the bio­phar­ma com­pa­ny is re­made in­to a new com­pa­ny with a new mis­sion: to fight opi­oid ad­dic­tion as it con­tin­ued to sell Oxy­Con­tin.

The mon­ey the com­pa­ny gen­er­ates go­ing for­ward would go to groups and in­di­vid­u­als harmed by the epi­dem­ic.

Sana seals pact with Fu­ji­film for iP­SC-de­rived cell ther­a­pies

Next-gen cell ther­a­py de­vel­op­er Sana has inked a deal for non-ex­clu­sive rights to Fu­ji­film Cel­lu­lar Dy­nam­ics’ iP­SC plat­form for the de­vel­op­ment of new ther­a­peu­tics. In the pact Fu­ji­film agreed to pro­vide re­search-grade and Good Man­u­fac­tur­ing Prac­tices-grade iP­SC lines for use.

“Our his­to­ry in man­u­fac­tur­ing iP­SCs for re­search-pur­pos­es has pro­vid­ed us with the foun­da­tion­al ex­per­tise to man­u­fac­ture qual­i­ty GMP-grade iP­SC lines,” said Fu­ji­film Cel­lu­lar Dy­nam­ics CEO Takeshi Ya­mamo­to said.

No terms were dis­closed.

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has tapped 5 new early-stage projects to back with up to $10 million each in fresh investments. The 5 biotechs are:

— Caribou, headed by Rachel Haurwitz and co-founded by Jennifer Doudna, is working on next-gen, off-the-shelf CAR-Ts to replace the patient-derived cells now in use.

— The LLS supported NexImmune’s IPO, helping fund its work on nanoparticles that can gin up an immune response directed at cancer cells. The biotech has 2 projects now in Phase I trials.

Francesco De Rubertis made no secret of IPO plans for Centessa, his 10-in-1 legacy play. Barely two months later, the S-1 is in.

The hot-off-the-press filing depicts the same grand vision that the longtime VC touted when he did the rounds in February: Take the asset-centric mindset that he’s been preaching at Medicxi over the years, and roll up a bunch of biotech upstarts, with unrelated risk profiles, into 1 pharma company that can carry on the development at scale.