Having rung the bell in phase II last summer, Ovid Therapeutics Inc. and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. signed a pact giving the latter global rights to develop and commercialize soticlestat, a first-in-class inhibitor of cholesterol 24-hydroxylase for the treatment of developmental and epileptic encephalopathies including Dravet syndrome (DS) and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS).

Debiopharm International SA is more interested in developing drugs than marketing them. Bertrand Ducrey, CEO of Debiopharm, said he envisions the drugs the company is stewarding through development as a "living pipeline" that needs to be refreshed as drugs get to late-stage development. So Debiopharm is shipping global rights to xevinapant (Debio-1143) and its follow-on inhibitor of apoptosis proteins antagonist, Debio-4028,  to Merck KGaA, of Darmstadt, Germany.

Roivant Sciences Ltd. is buying Silicon Therapeutics LLC for $450 million in Roivant equity plus regulatory and commercial milestone payments. The combination of Silicon’s computational physics platform for in silico design or optimizing small-molecule drugs with Roivant’s newly unveiled protein degradation platform will be powered by Roivant’s machine learning models.

Merck & Co. Inc. is paying $1.85 billion, or $60 per share, to acquire Pandion Therapeutics Inc. on the back of early stage data in human volunteers for its lead program, PT-101, an engineered interleukin-2 mutein fused to an Fc backbone, which is designed to stimulate targeted expansion of regulatory T cells for use in autoimmune disease indications.

Gilead Sciences Inc. was looking to get into oncology in a big way. Arcus Biosciences Inc. had a pipeline of cancer drugs it didn't want to break up. While a little unusual, the landmark 10-year pact the companies made last year just made sense, company executives explained during a session at Biocom California's Global Life Science Partnering Conference.

Gene therapy developer Beam Therapeutics Inc. has acquired drug delivery specialist Guide Therapeutics Inc. in a deal valued at up to $440 million, adding yet another piece of the integrated platform CEO John Evans told BioWorld the company is striving to build. Guide's lipid nanoparticle (LNP) screening technology could help medicines developed by Beam and its partners reach new targets beyond the liver, an increasingly important endeavor for gene therapy developers like Beam, seeking to maximize the breadth of their growing portfolios. Terms of the deal included $120 million up front, plus up to $320 million in stock-based technology and product success milestone payments. Shares in Beam (NASDAQ:BEAM) fell 12.6% to $96.48 on Feb. 23.

News of Vaccinex Inc. signing two multitarget deals with undisclosed "prominent pharmaceutical companies" sent company shares (NASDAQ:VCNX) up 70% to $4.88 on Feb. 19, even as financial terms of the deal went undisclosed. The collaborations will focus on using the company's ActivMAb antibody discovery and novel viral display platform to develop candidates against complex antigens such as G protein-coupled receptors and ion channels, the company said.