After an all-night negotiating session that concluded after 5 am on Dec. 12, political agreement was finally reached on the long-awaited EU pharmaceutical legislation. The aim of the new rules is to improve patient access and increase the competitiveness of the sector, but for the industry, it was too little too late in terms of the incentives, and potentially damaging in the measures to improve access.

The long-running dispute over rebates on sales of drugs that the pharma industry must pay to the U.K. government took a turn for the worse at the start of 2025, when it transpired that the rate would be going up from 15.3% to 22.9%. The row continued for most of the rest of the year before a truce of sorts was called in December.

Jacobio Pharmaceuticals Group Co. Ltd. is outlicensing its phase I pan-KRAS inhibitor, JAB-23E73, to Astrazeneca plc in a global deal worth up to $1.915 billion that gives Astrazeneca global rights to the compound outside of China, and the two companies will jointly develop and commercialize the asset in China.

ADEL Inc. closed a year-end licensing deal worth up to $1.04 billion with Sanofi SA for ADEL-Y01, a specific tau-targeting Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate in a U.S. phase I study.

Two large deals and an acquisition, totaling about $4.64 billion in all, are helping wrap up what’s turning out to be a strong year. Through the first 11 months of 2025, biopharma dealmaking was robust with a collective value of $261.14 billion, the highest January through November total of the past seven years and well above 2024’s $201.35 billion. These three December deals helped revive the surge in dealmaking that had cooled in November.

The EU finally reached agreement on an update of the 20-year-old pharmaceutical legislation, more than five years after the EU Commission first put forward the case for reform and following two and a half years of negotiations on the new rules.

Sanofi SA reported more hitches in the development of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor tolebrutinib, saying the phase III Perseus study failed to meet its primary endpoint in primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) and that the ongoing U.S. regulatory review in non-relapsing secondary progressive MS likely will extend beyond the targeted PDUFA date of Dec. 28.

The EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) is joining the U.S. FDA and the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in approving Anktiva (nogapendekin alfa inbakicept-pmin) in patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) who have not responded to immune stimulation treatment with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine and would otherwise require surgical removal of the bladder.

Disco Pharmaceuticals GmbH announced the final close of its seed round at €36 million (US$42 million), as it shapes up novel targets it has discovered with its surfaceome platform technology for formal preclinical development.