The FDA’s re­cent ap­proval of Pfiz­er’s mi­graine nasal spray was al­so good news for Roy­al­ty Phar­ma, trig­ger­ing a whop­ping $475 mil­lion mile­stone pay­ment.

Roy­al­ty first struck a deal in 2020 to of­fer Bio­haven $250 mil­lion in de­vel­op­ment fund­ing for the pro­gram, za­veg­epant, in ex­change for mile­stones and fu­ture roy­al­ties. This marks the first re­turn on that deal for Roy­al­ty, a spe­cial­ist in such pacts and an ac­cel­er­at­ed one at that, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

Pfiz­er in­her­it­ed the deal when it bought Bio­haven for $11.6 bil­lion last Oc­to­ber, and it’s set to pay Roy­al­ty more if oth­er goals are met over the next 10 years.

Like the oth­er Bio­haven pro­grams that Pfiz­er bought, Za­vzpret blocks the CGRP, or cal­ci­tonin gene-re­lat­ed pep­tide, re­cep­tor. But com­pared to oral op­tions, its in­tranasal de­liv­ery promis­es to re­sult in even faster re­lief as an acute treat­ment.

In the same 2020 deal, Roy­al­ty had al­so picked up a small per­cent­age of roy­al­ties for Bio­haven’s flag­ship mi­graine drug Nurtec, plus rights to a se­ries of pay­ments be­tween 2025 and 2030 for an ad­di­tion­al $200 mil­lion.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

Catalent will be manufacturing a low-cost version of the opioid overdose treatment naloxone as part of a contract with Harm Reduction Therapeutics.

Catalent plans to manufacture the treatment at its facility in Morrisville, NC. No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Harm Reduction was granted priority review status for the NDA on its spray last year. The company has been working on a naloxone product since 2017. It is anticipating approval in July of this year and a US launch in early 2024.

Last year, South African-based vaccine manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare was facing reports that it had not received a single order for its manufactured Covid-19 shots and that manufacturing lines were sitting idle. But now the vaccine producer is looking to turn things around.

Aspen’s disclosure of its financial results in March unveiled that manufacturing revenue had decreased by 12% to R 603 million ($33.8 million), which Lorraine Hill, Aspen Group’s COO, said is attributable to lower Covid vaccine sales.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.