Sh­iono­gi moved a cou­ple of months ago to get in tight with a low-pro­file biotech called Tetra Ther­a­peu­tics in Grand Rapids, MI. And what­ev­er they learned about their 2 Phase II stud­ies in Alzheimer’s and Frag­ile X syn­drome per­suad­ed the phar­ma play­er to ante up to $500 mil­lion more on a buy­out.

Tues­day morn­ing, Sh­iono­gi an­nounced that it is buy­ing Tetra out­right as the biotech nav­i­gates the fi­nal stretch­es on 2 mid-stage tri­als.

Both in­di­ca­tions are in the ex­treme high-risk cat­e­go­ry, with Tetra build­ing on a se­ries of grants to test its own ap­proach on pro­tect­ing the neu­ronal con­nec­tions that play a ma­jor role in cog­ni­tion and mem­o­ry.

Their lead drug is BPN14770, which tar­gets an en­zyme that is sup­posed to mod­u­late PDE4D. Sh­iono­gi orig­i­nal­ly got in­volved with Tetra back in 2018, when ex­ecs signed up li­cens­ing rights in Asia.

In March Sh­iono­gi fol­lowed up with a deal to ex­pand its stake in Tetra to 50%, ink­ing an op­tion on the buy­out based on the read­out for the Phase II PI­CAS­SO AD study in Alzheimer’s.

The an­nounce­ment, though, is short on fi­nan­cial de­tails. That’s not too sur­pris­ing, as Sh­iono­gi is ex­pand­ing in­to a field not­ed for 10 years of fail­ure and con­tro­ver­sy. Alzheimer’s has re­sist­ed just about every­thing thrown against it, with no suc­cess in mod­u­lat­ing the dis­ease it­self. Bio­gen has at­tract­ed equal parts of praise and crit­i­cism for its own at­tempt at get­ting a drug across the fin­ish line.

We can now wait for near-term proof-of-con­cept da­ta from Sh­iono­gi, which is keep­ing the lit­tle biotech as a whol­ly-owned sub­sidiary.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

A Maryland real estate project has added three new biotech-focused manufacturing and research buildings to an office park to keep up with demand created by the pandemic, the Washington Business Journal reported.

The Milestone Business Park — located off of I-270 in Germantown, MD — will see the new buildings and a total of 532,000 square feet as the campus rebrands to Milestone Innovation Park.