In the biggest deal of a year packed with massive deals, Astrazeneca plc will buy Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. in a cash and stock transaction at $175 per share totaling $39 billion.
TORONTO – Waterloo, Ontario-based DarwinAI Corp. and Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc.are developing a suite of deep neural networks for COVID-19 detection and risk stratification via chest radiography in cooperation with Boston Children’s Hospital. DarwinAI designed COVID-Net as “explainable” artificial intelligence (AI) that illuminates the inner workings of AI-driven medical technologies and promptly offered it on an open-source platform for the broader hospital community.
Gilead Sciences Inc.’s move to grab Myr GmbH for about €1.15 billion (US$1.39 billion) in cash up front, with €300 million if the latter’s Hepcludex (bulevirtide) wins FDA clearance, put chronic hepatitis delta virus (HDV) in the headlines and benefited the stock of another player in the space: Eiger Biopharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:EIGR), which closed at $10.27, up $1.51, or 17%.
Roche Holding AG has revealed a partnership with Moderna Inc. involving the use of the Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 S antibody test in the latter’s mRNA-1273 vaccine research trials. The news comes shortly after Roche received emergency use authorization from the U.S. FDA for the antibody test.
DUBLIN – Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH is paying up to €1.18 billion (US$1.4 billion) to acquire antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) developer NBE-Therapeutics AG. The deal includes an undisclosed up-front payment, plus development and regulatory milestones linked to the progress of NBE’s pipeline of clinical and preclinical ADC programs.
Fresh off hitting key regulatory milestones in Europe and the U.S. for its investigational cholestatic liver disease therapy, maralixibat, Mirum Pharmaceuticals Inc. has secured a $210 million deal with Oberland Capital Management LLC supporting the drug's potential commercialization and the company's pipeline development plans.
HONG KONG – Taipei, Taiwan-based Pharmaengine Inc. has signed a collaboration and licensing deal with Cambridge, U.K.-based Sentinel Oncology Ltd. for the latter’s checkpoint kinase 1 inhibitor, SOL-578. Through the agreement, Sentinel will receive an exclusivity payment and Pharmaengine will fund the IND-enabling studies.
LONDON – Retinai Medicine AG reported a three-year master agreement with Novartis AG to apply its artificial intelligence (AI) tools in ophthalmology clinical trials. The first project will look at how machine learning can be used to speed up and improve the interpretation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
While med-tech deal values fall significantly short of last year, the 1,240 deals worth $4 billion recorded through November place 2020 above 2018 in terms of value and well above each of the last two years in terms of volume.
RSS
