Big Phar­ma ex­it­ed from the an­tibi­otics space one by one. And now they may be com­ing back to­geth­er.

Pfiz­er, Eli Lil­ly, No­vo Nordisk, Boehringer In­gel­heim, Bay­er Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, Mer­ck KGaA and the Amer­i­can Mer­ck — one of the last gi­ants stand­ing — are team­ing up to cre­ate a $1 bil­lion for-prof­it ven­ture to bet on small biotechs de­vel­op­ing mid-stage an­tibi­otics, Ed Sil­ver­man re­port­ed for STAT.

Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials from Ger­many, Swe­den, France and the UK, as well as rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Well­come Trust and Pew Char­i­ta­ble Trusts, will join the com­pa­nies to an­nounce the ini­tia­tive on Ju­ly 9, Sil­ver­man wrote. The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion and the Eu­ro­pean In­vest­ment Bank are al­so in­volved in what is be­ing billed as a new so­lu­tion to the “an­tibi­ot­ic in­no­va­tion chal­lenge.”

Con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of play­ers and the col­lec­tive heft they bring — plus the fact that the EIB might con­tribute as much as 10% — the mon­ey isn’t much. By phar­ma stan­dards, $1 bil­lion won’t even buy you a bolt-on deal, typ­i­cal­ly in the $2 bil­lion to $5 bil­lion range. It al­so marks the thresh­old for block­buster sta­tus that any big can­cer drug fran­chise could eas­i­ly sur­pass.

Still, mil­lions of dol­lars could pro­vide a life­line for biotechs starved of cash, es­pe­cial­ly in a field that many VCs are stay­ing out of.

Just days ago La Jol­la sealed the third — and seem­ing­ly fi­nal — buy­out for Tetraphase and its com­mer­cial an­tibi­ot­ic, pre­vail­ing over mul­ti­ple com­pet­ing bids by Acel­Rx and Melin­ta. And even that on­ly cost $43 mil­lion in up­front cash and $16 mil­lion in po­ten­tial CVRs.

The key ques­tion will be whether the cre­ation of this new ven­ture, which Sil­ver­man de­scribed as an ex­ten­sion of the work of pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship CARB-X in back­ing ear­ly-stage an­tibi­otics de­vel­op­ment, will be ac­com­pa­nied by changes in the re­im­burse­ment sys­tem. At the end of the day, if de­vel­op­ers can’t make much mon­ey off their drugs, in­vestors may not see a point in try­ing to help get them ap­proved at all.

As con­cerns about an­tibi­ot­ic re­sis­tance loom ever larg­er, though, the ef­fort it­self may count.

“The think­ing is that, ide­al­ly, if they put mon­ey in [the fund], this will serve them in the long run, but al­so make them look good,” reads a key quote. “They got pret­ty bad press when they walked out on an­tibi­otics.”

Eli Lilly is fronting some new cash in a space they’re quite familiar with.

The company is partnering with Japan’s Asahi Kasei Pharma on an experimental drug for chronic pain, acquiring the rights for the P2X7 receptor antagonist program dubbed AK1780. Lilly will shell out a pretty penny for the program, promising up to $410 million total should each milestone payment come to pass.

Asahi Kasei will receive an upfront sum of $20 million for the candidate. In addition, Lilly is on the hook for up to $210 million in development and regulatory milestones and another potential $180 million in sales milestones. Asahi Kasei can also obtain royalties ranging from the mid-single to low-double digits should an approved product come out of the deal.

One of the world’s leading CDMOs has launched a new technology it says will expedite a quickly-growing sect of biotech drug development: off-the-shelf, allogeneic cell therapies.

It’s been nearly a decade since the FDA approved the first use of the method that uses healthy donor cells to create a master cell bank, which is then used for specific therapies — a cord blood allogeneic treatment called Hemacord. In the years since, the use of allogeneic cells has taken off in research circles, most notably in the use of T cell therapies to target solid tumor cancers.

Nearly a year ago, as the pandemic encroached and the stock market cratered, Flagship and ARCH Venture announced three mega-funds worth a combined $2.6 billion. They wanted, ARCH’s Bob Nelsen said, to restore confidence “that there was money out there and a lot of it” to invest in biotech.

Since then, the stock market has returned — almost frighteningly so — and Nelsen has kept raising and spending cash. On Thursday, he announced a new fund, worth $1.85 billion. It’s the largest pot yet for a VC famous for its deep pockets.