Pfiz­er is in­vest­ing some mon­ey in its Ly­me dis­ease part­ner biotech as the pair gears up for a Phase III study.

The Big Phar­ma chipped in $95 mil­lion in eq­ui­ty for Val­ne­va, good enough for an 8.1% stake in the French vac­cine mak­er. Mon­day’s deal comes af­ter the two com­pa­nies ini­tial­ly agreed to de­vel­op the can­di­date in April 2020 and a few months af­ter the pro­gram read out Phase II pe­di­atric re­sults.

Kathrin Jansen

“As the ge­o­graph­ic foot­print of Ly­me dis­ease widens, the med­ical need for vac­ci­na­tion be­comes even more im­per­a­tive,” Pfiz­er’s head of vac­cines R&D Kathrin Jansen said in a state­ment. “We are ex­cit­ed to con­tin­ue part­ner­ing with Val­ne­va on the de­vel­op­ment of VLA15 and look for­ward to work­ing to­geth­er to progress the pro­gram.”

The eq­ui­ty deal val­ued Val­ne­va’s stock price at $10.02 per share. In­vestors re­act­ed warm­ly to the news, with Val­ne­va shares $VALN jump­ing 83% while the mar­ket was closed for the June­teenth hol­i­day, af­ter drop­ping 13% in the fi­nal min­utes of last Fri­day’s trad­ing ses­sion.

On top of the eq­ui­ty fi­nanc­ing, Pfiz­er and Val­ne­va are al­so slight­ly amend­ing their orig­i­nal Ly­me dis­ease vac­cine deal. Val­ne­va will now take on 40% of the re­main­ing shared de­vel­op­ment costs in­stead of 30%, and Pfiz­er will pay roy­al­ties rang­ing from 14% to 22% in­stead of start­ing at 19%. Pfiz­er will add an­oth­er $100 mil­lion in po­ten­tial sales mile­stones as well.

Val­ne­va had made most of its head­lines in the last cou­ple years for its work in Covid-19 vac­cines, promis­ing to de­vel­op an al­ter­na­tive shot to the wide­ly used Pfiz­er, Mod­er­na and As­traZeneca jabs. Though Val­ne­va’s shot even­tu­al­ly got across the fin­ish line in the UK, the vac­cine like­ly will not be avail­able in Eu­rope much longer af­ter the EU de­cid­ed to ter­mi­nate its pur­chase agree­ment last month.

And last week, the com­pa­ny said chances of re­viv­ing the con­tract are slim, send­ing its shares plung­ing.

But the Ly­me dis­ease pro­gram has rolled right along, pass­ing a Phase II test for adults last Sep­tem­ber and achiev­ing its goals in an­oth­er Phase II study in April. Funds from Mon­day’s eq­ui­ty fi­nanc­ing are ex­pect­ed to go to­ward the piv­otal Phase III tri­al, which will like­ly launch in the third quar­ter, the com­pa­nies said.

SPACs might be slowly creeping back.

Monday evening, Estrella Biopharma said it was going public via a SPAC deal with TradeUP Acquisition Corp. The deal is set to close in the first half of 2023, and if all goes as planned, the public version of Estrella — dubbed Estrella Immunopharma — will be worth around $398.5 million.

The Bay Area biotech will also get around $45.4 million in cash, and TradeUp stockholders will get around 15% stock in the public biotech.

The path at Voyager Therapeutics keeps winding, and at the 12-month deadline, Pfizer has elected to only move forward with one of two capsids out of the preclinical biotech for the Big Pharma’s AAV gene therapies.

Last October, the Big Pharma and biotech linked arms on a deal that gave Pfizer the ability to hit the gas pedal on two capsids: one for a cardiac target and the other for a rare neurologic disease target.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024.

The decision to not re-commercialize Natpara will be a blow to not only the 2,400 people who were awaiting supplies of their reliable injection since 2019, but also the additional nearly 400 people who were accessing the drugs via the company’s Special Use Program as Takeda sought to resolve these manufacturing issues over the past five years.