A new multilateral working group could bring deeper scrutiny to biopharma mergers, both past and future. The group, made up of competition experts from Canada, the EU, U.K. and U.S., is taking on the job of identifying fresh approaches to analyze and address the competitive concerns raised by biopharma M&As.

Intec Pharma Ltd. is merging with privately held Decoy Biosystems Inc. and the combined company will continue advancing Decoy’s immunotherapy technology for treating a variety of tumors and chronic viral infections.

Five years after its initial investment in Maverick Therapeutics Inc., Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. is exercising its option to buy the privately held company for a pre-negotiated up-front payment plus development and regulatory milestones of up to $525 million.

DUBLIN – Grifols SA is acquiring Gigagen Inc. outright by paying $80 million for the remaining 56% of the company’s equity it does not already own. Its total outlay comes to $115 million, as it had previously acquired a 35% stake in South San Francisco-based Gigagen back in 2017.

HONG KONG – Lianbio Co. Ltd. has inked a deal for the development and commercialization of Reviral Ltd.’s sisunatovir, picking up rights to the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) candidate in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore in exchange for an up-front cash payment of $14 million and development and commercial milestone payments of up to $105 million.

Lured by what Amgen Inc. CEO Bob Bradway called a "compelling opportunity" to strengthen the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based company's oncology portfolio and support its international expansion strategy, Amgen on March 4 moved to buy South San Francisco-based Five Prime Therapeutics Inc. for $38 per share, or about $1.9 billion.

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.