Bat­tered af­ter a spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure with its Alzheimer’s drug can­di­date, Neu­rotrope Bio­sciences is be­ing ab­sorbed by a pri­vate­ly-held com­pa­ny that makes an erec­tile dys­func­tion (ED) treat­ment.

Sten­dra mak­er Metuchen Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, which was cen­sured by the FDA last year for mak­ing mis­lead­ing claims about its ED ther­a­py, is vault­ing on to the Nas­daq fol­low­ing the all-stock merg­er with Neu­rotrope, un­der a new name: Pet­ros (the Greek word for “rock”).

Pet­ros is set to be a men’s health com­pa­ny, with its flag­ship Sten­dra drug (which gen­er­at­ed rough­ly $30 mil­lion last year) as well as a pipeline that in­cludes a re­cent­ly in-li­censed prod­uct for Pey­ronie’s dis­ease, a non-can­cer­ous con­di­tion that emerges as a re­sult of fi­brous scar tis­sue that caus­es curved, painful erec­tions.

Un­der the deal, which has been ap­proved by both boards and is ex­pect­ed to close in the third quar­ter, Metuchen share­hold­ers (Jug­ger­naut Cap­i­tal Part­ners have the prin­ci­pal stake) will own the ma­jor­i­ty 80% of the com­bined com­pa­ny, while Neu­rotrope stake­hold­ers will have the re­main­der.

Charles Ryan

Once con­sum­mat­ed, Neu­rotrope’s CEO Charles Ryan is set to be­come Pet­ros’ chief and re­launch Sten­dra. Pet­ros will al­so have ac­cess to Neu­rotrope’s rough­ly $20 mil­lion in avail­able cash and cash equiv­a­lents, while Neu­rotrope’s set­back-marred neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion com­pound Bryo­statin-1, as­sets, and li­a­bil­i­ties will be spun out in­to a sep­a­rate­ly-trad­ed com­pa­ny.

Last Sep­tem­ber, the ex­per­i­men­tal drug failed to do bet­ter than the place­bo in a mid-stage study in­volv­ing mod­er­ate-to-se­vere Alzheimer’s pa­tients. In fact, the drug arm did a lit­tle worse than a sug­ar pill in the key study, mark­ing yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of fail­ure in the ar­du­ous field of Alzheimer’s drug de­vel­op­ment. The com­pa­ny’s shares $NTRP cratered as a re­sult, hit­ting a low of $1.

How­ev­er, in Jan­u­ary, the com­pa­ny said a posthoc analy­sis of the study sug­gest­ed the drug could be res­ur­rect­ed for use in Alzheimer’s and un­veiled a $2.7 mil­lion grant from the NIH to take the pro­gram for­ward. The move de­light­ed, caus­ing the stock to more than dou­ble.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.