DUBLIN – Merus NV is banking $40 million up front, plus an equity investment of $20 million, under a research collaboration and license agreement with Eli Lilly and Co.’s Loxo Oncology arm to develop up to three CD3-directed bispecific T-cell engager antibodies. Each program also has up to $540 million attached in development and commercialization milestones, taking the total potential value of the deal to $1.68 billion. Merus would also receive tiered royalties on any product sales, ranging, in percentage terms, from mid-single-digits to low-double-digits.

Dublin – IO Biotech ApS raised €127 million (US$154.7 million) in a series B round to fund a potentially pivotal trial of its combination of cancer vaccines in first-line metastatic melanoma. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company is one of a number of firms fueling a mini-resurgence in immuno-oncology in the early weeks of the new year, as new data and new insights are prompting additional investments in an area that some had thought was already oversubscribed.

DUBLIN – Sanofi SA is paying $1.1 billion up front and up to $350 million more in potential clinical development and regulatory milestones to acquire antibody developer Kymab Ltd. The deal adds to Sanofi’s pipeline first-in-class OX40-ligand blocker KY-1005, which recently hit the primary endpoints of a phase IIa trial in atopic dermatitis, as well as a second clinical-stage asset, KY-1044, an ICOS agonist in development for solid tumors. It also brings Sanofi a new antibody discovery platform, comprising several transgenic mouse strains, which collectively encode all the building blocks required to produce fully human antibodies.

DUBLIN – European biopharma, like the rest of the global industry, scaled new heights in 2020 from an investment perspective. European firms collectively raised $12.682 billion from the private and public equity markets, as well as substantial levels of debt and grant funding. It was a bumper year for both venture capital investment and for Europe’s growing cadre of listed companies.

DUBLIN – A re-evaluation of psychedelic drugs as potential therapies for major depressive disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other neuropsychiatric conditions has been underway for some time, but this broad effort gained further momentum during 2020, as commercial firms started to raise money at the level needed to enable the field to start moving from small-scale academic studies to the kind of industry-scale trials that will be needed to convince regulators, patients and physicians that these molecules could become viable treatment options.

Skyhawk Therapeutics Inc., one of the early leaders in developing small-molecule drugs that target RNA, closed out the year with yet another big pharma partnering deal, an alliance with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., in which it is getting $40 million up front plus up to $2.2 billion more in milestones and royalties on product sales.

DUBLIN – Could a tyrosine kinase inhibitor approved for treating canine cancer offer clinical benefits in Alzheimer’s disease? That’s the bold claim AB Science SA is making, after unveiling top-line data from a phase IIb/III trial in which it reported that a subgroup of patients on a twice daily 4.5-mg/kg dose of oral masitinib experienced “a significant treatment effect” as compared with placebo after 24 weeks.