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.

Takeda has been burdened under mountains of debt since acquiring Shire for $62 billion 18 months ago, but one of the company’s biggest moves yet to relieve the stress could be on the horizon.

The Japanese pharma is preparing a bidding war for its $3.7 billion over-the-counter subsidiary, a sale that would dwarf previous spinoffs. Any transaction would be the latest in what’s been a long string of sell-offs, as Takeda marches unflinchingly toward its ultimate goal of shedding $10 billion in assets.

Investors, it seems, are willing to give Unum Therapeutics one last shot — or at least one last shot to a company of that name.

The ailing cancer biotech, beset by a series of clinical holds and multiple failed lead programs, announced today that they’ve acquired Kiq LLC and that investors are putting in $104 million to advance Kiq’s pipeline of kinase inhibitors. Unum shareholders will now own only 16.2% of the company and CEO Chuck Wilson indicated that the cell therapies the biotech has worked on since its founding may be on their way out, saying Unum will “explore strategic options” for those products.

Seven years after Pfizer first invested in Mission Therapeutics, a biotech that researches selectively inhibiting deubiquitylating enzymes (DUBs), the pharma giant is re-upping its commitment to the company in another sign of confidence in the field of protein degradation.

Pfizer’s VC arm is heading up a $15 million round, announced Monday morning, and increasing its overall stake in Mission. Pfizer is also entering into a licensing agreement that would give it first dibs at negotiating exclusivity after accessing certain DUB inhibitors and screening them for their potential as drugs.