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.”

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.

While falling behind the biggest PD-(L)1 drugs in terms of sales, Roche has looked to carve out a space for its Tecentriq with a growing expertise in lung cancer. The drug will now take an early lead in the sought-after adjuvant setting — but competitors are on the way.

The FDA on Friday approved Tecentriq as an adjuvant therapy for patients with Stage II-IIIA non small cell lung cancer with PD-(L)1 scores greater than or equal to 1, making it the first drug of its kind approved in an early setting that covers around 40% of all NSCLC patients.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Friday voted 19-0 in favor of authorizing a second shot of J&J’s Covid-19 vaccine to follow at least two months after the initial dose.

Regulators don’t have to follow VRBPAC’s recommendation, but they almost always do. Considering that the CDC’s advisory committee has already been set to review the expanded EUA, VRBPAC’s recommendation is likely to be adopted.

Three new entities priced their public debuts late Thursday and early Friday, including a SPAC, a traditional Nasdaq IPO and a Chinese biotech joining the Hong Kong Index.

Shanghai-based Abbisko Therapeutics raised the most money of the triumvirate, garnering $226 million in its Hong Kong debut and pricing at HK$12.46, or roughly $1.60 in US dollars. The blank check company followed up with a $150 million raise, while MiNK Therapeutics priced on Nasdaq at $12 per share and a $40 million raise.

While a horde of drugmakers develops bispecific antibodies to more directly target tumor cells — there were about 100 programs in or nearing clinical trials back in May — a new company is emerging to go one step further.

On Thursday, Tentarix Biotherapeutics unveiled a $50 million Series A round to support its next-gen multi-specifics platform. While the field has largely focused on bispecifics, which engage two targets, Tentarix believes its multifunctional programs have the potential to be even more specific, since more conditions must be met for potent activity to occur.