Baxter International Inc. wasted no time in tackling its New Year’s resolution to trim down the business. On Friday morning, the company revealed details around the divestitures it foreshadowed in its third quarter 2022 earnings call with the announcement that it planned a tax-free spin off its Renal Care and Acute Therapies businesses into an independent, publicly traded company within the next 12 to 18 months.

With many of the big names in med tech focused on streamlining their portfolios and spinning off divisions as independent companies, M&A activity sputtered through most of 2022. As the year comes to a close, however, deal volume has increased, with a strong trend toward acquisitions of closely related companies and units that bolstered higher-growth product lines and offered short cuts to filling in significant gaps in portfolios.

The success of new year’s resolutions for 2023 won’t be known for months to come, but from the vantage point of December, it is easy to see that many large med-tech companies resolved to shed excess weight in 2022 – and did so in dramatic fashion. Some big-name players decided that they would be more agile, and better rewarded by shareholders, with a trimmer portfolio, while others saw value in setting internal operating units free as new companies. As part of our year in review, BioWorld looks at the big deals, the new companies and the impact of all these actions on 2023.

When the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down travel and conferences starting in the first part of 2020, the general lament was that the lack of face-to-face interaction would hamper biopharma companies’ ability to secure deals and investments. Instead, the opposite happened. Now, coming off two years of record-breaking financing, the biopharma sector is facing an inevitable correction, though a handful of venture capital panelists suggested there’s room for optimism.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) agreed to acquire circulatory support device maker Abiomed Inc. for $380 per share in cash, corresponding to an enterprise value of $16.6 billion and a more than 50% premium on the share price as of the market close on Oct. 31. Abiomed shareholders will also receive a non-tradeable contingent value right that entitles them to $35 per share in cash, if certain milestones are met. That would bring the premium to 60%.

The U.S. FDA cleared teclistamab from Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. as the first bispecific antibody for treating patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (MM), joining other BCMA-targeted drugs, including an antibody-drug conjugate and CAR T therapies.

The annual North American Spine Society (NASS) Conference wraps up in Chicago on Oct. 15 and management discussions and analysts make it clear that the sector is not yet back to normal. While September showed an uptick in procedures, spinal surgery continues to lag the recovery seen elsewhere in orthopedics. As the challenges of the past two years recede, two players have posted notable gains in market share and revenue—Globus Medical Inc. and Alphatec Holdings Inc.—perhaps indicating a competitive advantage for smaller, more agile companies.

Even though the EU had approved more than a dozen biosimilars by 2012, the follow-on biologics were still in their embryonic stage around the world when BioWorld published The Biosimilars Game: A Scorecard for Opportunities, Threats and Critical Strategies in early 2013. Now, nearly a decade later, the global biosimilar landscape has matured with many more biosimilars approved across the globe, but the uptake, and thus the savings, is not what some policy makers and people in industry had hoped for or expected.

Big pharma is increasingly turning to Taiwan to leverage the power of the country’s data and computing power as precision medicine takes center stage in drug development, speakers said during the recent BIO Asia-Taiwan conference in Taipei.