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.

Facing the big dogs in the PD-(L)1 space, AstraZeneca has taken its own contender Imfinzi into blockbuster territory in its four years on the market but sees even bigger things for the drug. Combinations could be the key, and early results from a mid-stage test are adding some fuel to that strategy.

Imfinzi combined with one of two investigational immunotherapies — a CD73 antibody dubbed oleclumab or an Innate’s anti-NGK2a named monalizumab — topped Imfinzi alone in terms of overall response and progression-free survival in patients with stage III non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors had not worsened during concurrent chemoradiation, according to interim data from the Phase II COAST trial set to be presented at #ESMO21.

One Spanish biotech is beefing up its plasma therapy operations, and on Friday, it announced that it’s doing so in a billion-dollar deal.

Grifols is now the largest shareholder of Biotest, a company valued at more than $1.8 billion. By teaming up, the two will try to increase the number of plasma therapies available and increase patient access around the world, Grifols said in a press release.

The company did so by acquiring holding company Tiancheng Pharmaceutical, the Germany-based owner of nearly 90% of Biotest shares, for nearly $1.27 billion. Grifols now owns nearly 90% of Biotest voting rights and almost 45% of the total share capital of Biotest.

The FDA released briefing documents this week from the agency and Pfizer each outlining their arguments for today’s Covid-19 booster shot adcomm, but one thing conspicuously missing was the question on which panel members would be voting. But late Thursday night, regulators published that question.

Adcomm members will be asked whether or not the safety and efficacy data from Pfizer/BioNTech’s original Phase III study “support approval” of a booster shot at least six months after the second dose in individuals older than 16. The question notably excludes the real-world data from Israel and other analyses that Pfizer and the Biden administration had said would be a centerpiece of their arguments for boosters.

The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT played a significant role in mapping out genes as part of the Human Genome Project about two decades ago. Now, it’s joining forces with one of the industry’s largest research foundations in an effort to translate those maps.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation, which operates independently from the biotech Novo Nordisk, is teeing up $47.5 million to work with the Broad on mining genetic data in the hopes of better understanding how variants drive disease.

→ Last week we told you about the CMO revolving door at ADC Therapeutics, as Joseph Camardo replaced the departing Jay Feingold. The next opportunity for Feingold in the CMO slot has opened up at antibody-drug conjugate and mAb developer Pyxis Oncology, which has added several new execs and scientific advisory board members in recent months, including ex-Immunovant CFO Pamela Yanchik Connealy. Before his tenure at ADC, Feingold was Daiichi Sankyo’s VP of US medical affairs and chairman of the Global Medical Affairs Oversight Committee. Within weeks in March, Pyxis struck a licensing deal with Pfizer for two of its ADCs and raked in $152 million from a Series B round.