The buzz about Novartis’ latest buyout deal was right, mostly.

On Wednesday evening the pharma giant put out word that it snagged Takeda’s dry eye drug Xiidra — which the Japanese company swooped up in its Shire acquisition — for $3.4 billion cash, with another $1.9 billion in milestones on the table. As part of the deal, Novartis is taking on 400 staffers who are working on the drug, reducing more of the burn that Takeda took on in the Shire buyout.

But that’s not all.

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Three years after Sumitomo scooped up Roivant’s 46% stake in the publicly traded Myovant $MYOV as part of a 5-company, $3 billion deal, they’re coming back for the whole thing.

But these other investors at Myovant want more than what the Japanese pharma company is currently offering to pay at this stage.

Sumitomo is bidding $22.75 a share for the outstanding stock, which now represents 48% of the company after Sumitomo bumped its ownership since the original deal with Roivant. Myovant, however, created a special committee on the board, and they’re shaking their heads over the offer.

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Not 24 hours after earning the first ALS drug approval in five years, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals’ Relyvrio is already drawing scrutiny. And it’s coming from multiple fronts.

In an investor call Friday morning, Amylyx revealed that it would charge about $158,000 per year, a price point that immediately drew backlash from ALS advocates and some outside observers. The cost reveal had been highly anticipated in the immediate hours after Thursday evening’s approval, though Amylyx only teased Relyvrio would cost less than previously approved drugs.

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What can a cough say about a patient’s illness? Quite a bit, according to ResApp Health — and Pfizer’s listening.

The pharma giant is shelling out about $116 million ($179 million AUD) to scoop up the University of Queensland spinout and its smartphone technology that promises to diagnose Covid and other respiratory illnesses based on cough and breathing sounds, the university announced last week.

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Pfizer, GSK, Janssen, Regeneron, Boehringer Ingelheim and at least a half dozen other companies are calling on the FDA to provide significantly more clarity in its draft guidance from this summer on clinical outcome assessments, which are a type of patient experience.

The draft is the third in a series of four patient-focused drug development guidance documents that the FDA had to create as part of the 21st Century Cures Act, and they describe how stakeholders (patients, caregivers, researchers, medical product developers and others) can collect and submit patient experience data and other relevant information for medical product development and regulatory decision-making.

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With its first drug launch in the books, Insmed is now focusing on building out a road map for upcoming products – with an eye on consumer marketing strategies.

For CEO Will Lewis, that means tapping consumer insights as early as possible and developing products and packaging that are intuitive and easy to use. It also means translating those patient experiences into creative and atypical biopharma marketing, and in both cases, taking a page from consumer marketers’ playbooks.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Pharmacy benefit managers have become a thorn in the side of the pharma and insurance industries in recent years, and just a couple of months after the Federal Trade Commission signaled it would investigate unlawful PBM practices, FTC chair Lina Khan is looking to turn up the heat even more.

Khan sat down with National Community Pharmacists Association CEO Douglas Hoey on Monday morning at the NCPA’s annual convention, with a fireside chat in the heart of the Midwest.

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Despite the FDA approving an ALS drug for the first time in five years last week, the disease continues to fluster researchers, and another biotech is feeling the pain of a mid-stage failure.

Clene Nanomedicine reported early Monday that its ALS program, which uses gold nanocrystals to try to catalyze intracellular reactions, did not achieve its Phase II primary or secondary endpoints. And in a press release, the company noted for the first time that it’s speaking with “potential strategic partners” about the program — language that typically indicates a biotech is preparing to sell off an asset.

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