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.

Medical animation has in recent years become an increasingly important tool for conveying niche information to a varied audience, particularly to those audiences without expertise in the specialist area. Science programmes today, for example, have moved from the piece-to-camera of the university professor explaining how a complex disease mechanism works, to actually showing the viewer first-hand what it might look like to shrink ourselves down to the size of an ant’s foot, and travel inside the human body to witness these processes in action. Effectively communicating a complex disease pathophysiology, or the novel mechanism of action of a new drug, can be complex. This is especially difficult when the audience domain knowledge is limited or non-existent. Medical animation can help with this communication challenge in several ways.
Improved accessibility to visualisation
Visualisation is a core component of our ability to understand a concept. Ask 10 people to visualise an apple, and each will come up with a slightly different image, some apples smaller than others, some more round, some with bites taken. Acceptable, you say, we can move on to the next part of the story. Now ask 10 people to visualise how HIV’s capsid protein gets arranged into the hexamers and pentamers that form the viral capsid that holds HIV’s genetic material. This request may pose a challenge even to someone with some virology knowledge, and it is that inability to effectively visualise what is going on that holds us back from fully understanding the rest of the story. So how does medical animation help us to overcome this visualisation challenge?

As a potentially powerful flu season looms, so does a big test for Roche and its new flu drug, Xofluza. The Swiss giant just got a small boost in advance of that test as the FDA expanded Xofluza’s indication to include patients at high risk of developing flu-related complications.

Xofluza (baloxavir marboxil) was approved last October in the US, the first landmark flu drug approval in 20 years and a much-needed green light for a company that had watched its leading flu drug Tamiflu get eaten alive by generics. Like its predecessor, the pill offered a reduction in flu symptoms but not a cure.

The first-ever Ebola vaccine is on the precipice of approval after the European Medicine’s Agency (EMA) backed the Merck product in this week’s roster of recommendations.

The drugmaker $MRK began developing the vaccine, christened Ervebo, during the West African outbreak that occurred between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,000.

The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has shown case fatality rates of approximately 67%, the agency estimated. Earlier this year, the WHO declared the outbreak — which so far has infected more than 3,000 people — a public health emergency of international concern.

ICER, an increasingly influential cost-effectiveness watchdog in the United States, has concluded in its review of treatments for cardiovascular disease that while the cost of J&J’s Xarelto and Amarin’s Vascepa meet its benchmark for value pricing — the two treatments will not likely treat as many patients as hoped without surpassing the annual budget threshold calculated by ICER for each therapy.