Lon­nie Moul­der, Tesaro CEO

The PARP wars may be about ready to in­spire some fresh M&A ac­tiv­i­ty.

In the wake of Pfiz­er’s big $14 bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of Medi­va­tion last fall, which in­clud­ed the PARP drug ta­la­zoparib, sources are telling Reuters that Tesaro $TSRO has been field­ing some in­com­ing queries about a buy­out. And with its PARP drug ni­ra­parib un­der re­view at the FDA, Tesaro has be­come one of the most fre­quent­ly cit­ed takeover tar­gets in biotech, where promis­ing late-stage as­sets can be hard to find.

Ni­ra­parib is billed as a like­ly ri­val to As­traZeneca’s Lyn­parza, which got an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval with a thin set of da­ta that the phar­ma gi­ant has been build­ing on. And back in De­cem­ber Clo­vis gained an ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval for an­oth­er PARP, Rubra­ca (ru­ca­parib).

As we re­port­ed a few days ago, ni­ra­parib sits high on a list of 15 po­ten­tial block­busters ready to hit the mar­ket this year, with 2022 sales rev­enue pro­ject­ed at $1.8 bil­lion for the ovar­i­an can­cer mar­ket.

That’s why an­a­lysts like David Nieren­garten at Wed­bush re­main con­vinced that a deal al­most has to be in the works. He not­ed:

TSRO re­mains our top take­out pick for 2017. We be­lieve TSRO’s pro­file as an on­col­o­gy com­pa­ny with one ap­proved prod­uct (Varu­bi) and a po­ten­tial block­buster in reg­is­tra­tion (ni­ra­parib’s PDU­FA date is June 30, 2017), is at­trac­tive for big phar­ma.

Tesaro’s shares are up 14% Wednes­day af­ter­noon.

Tesaro, re­ports Reuters, hasn’t been shop­ping the com­pa­ny. But then again, that’s not how you get the best price for a biotech. That dance gen­er­al­ly in­volves an un­so­licit­ed bid fol­lowed by a tus­sle over val­u­a­tion and hope­ful­ly – from the sell­er’s per­spec­tive – a bid­ding war among ea­ger ri­vals. Sanofi has played that role twice, first boost­ing the val­ue of Medi­va­tion and then help­ing Acte­lion with its ne­go­ti­a­tions with J&J – which end­ed in a $30 bil­lion deal and a spin­out of a new com­pa­ny fo­cused on the pipeline.

Last year proved a dis­ap­point­ment on the M&A side. But with sev­er­al deals done ear­ly in 2017, in­clud­ing Acte­lion, the smart mon­ey is bet­ting on a slate of biotech buy­outs this year.

Earlier this year, an executive from Juvenescence-backed AgeX predicted the field of longevity will eventually “dwarf the dotcom boom.” Greg Bailey, the UK-based anti-aging biotech’s CEO, certainly hopes so.

On Monday, Juvenescence completed its $100 million Series B round of financing. The company is backed by British billionaire Jim Mellon — who wrote his 400-page guide to investing in the field of longevity shortly after launching the company in 2017.  Bailey, who served as a board director for seven years at Medivation before Pfizer swallowed the biotech for $14 billion, is joined by Declan Doogan, an industry veteran with stints at Pfizer and Amarin.

Another big drug approval came through on Friday afternoon as the FDA OK’d AbbVie’s upadacitinib — an oral JAK1 inhibitor that is hitting the rheumatoid arthritis market with a black box warning of serious malignancies, infections and thrombosis reflecting fears associated with the class.

It will be sold as Rinvoq — at a wholesale price of $59,000 a year — and will likely soon face competition from a drug that AbbVie once controlled, and spurned. Reuters reports that a 4-week supply of Humira, by comparison, is $5,174, adding up to about $67,000 a year.

After a “hot” period of rapid growth between 2009 and 2012, and a relatively “cooler” period of slower growth from 2013 to 2015, China has once again become a top-of-mind priority for the CEOs of most large, multinational pharmaceutical companies.

At the International Pharma Forum, hosted in March in Beijing by the R&D Based Pharmaceutical Association Committee (RDPAC) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), no fewer than seven CEOs of major multinational pharmaceutical firms participated, including GSK, Eli Lilly, LEO Pharma, Merck KGaA, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB. A few days earlier, the CEOs of several other large multinationals attended the China Development Forum, an annual business forum hosted by the research arm of China’s State Council. It’s hard to imagine any other country, except the US, having such drawing power at CEO level.