| | | |   | Good morning, all. Damian here with a reminder to please give us your recommendations for books and podcasts that deal with health, medicine, and the life sciences that would be great to check out this summer. We're compiling suggestions from readers, STAT staff, and notable figures in our world, and you can submit yours here. | | | ARCH raised $3 billion for out-of-vogue biotech upstarts While the dismal market for biotech has soured some venture capitalists on investing in early-stage companies, ARCH Venture Partners has raised $3 billion to do just that.
As STAT’s Matthew Herper reports, ARCH has become known for helping put together deals involving outsize sums to back firms like cancer testing firm GRAIL and Altos Laboratories, which in January announced that it had raised $3 billion to work on regenerative medicine.
Now ARCH is looking to back more startups that, as one founder put it, require a level of investment that is “made easier by a fund of this size.”
Read more. | Covid boosters are probably getting a revamp A panel of FDA advisers voted to recommend a revamp for Covid-19 vaccines, endorsing a new generation of shots that would specifically address the dominant Omicron strain.
But, as STAT’s Helen Branswell and Matthew Herper report, the implications aren’t quite so simple. The panel voted 19-2 in favor of there being an Omicron component in this fall’s booster campaign, but in conversation, panelists were split as to just what the component should be. Some favored a bivalent booster, one that would address the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 along with Omicron, while some suggested the U.S. should distribute an Omicron-specific shot for people who’ve already been vaccinated.
Most agreed that, in a perfect world, they’d have considerably more data to consider before weighing in. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said he felt that the move to new-variant vaccines was happening too fast, with too little data. “I think as a new product it should be handled as a new product,” he said. “I think we need a higher standard than what we’ve been given. I think it’s uncomfortably scant.”
Read more. | How can technology support growth for emerging life sciences companies? Hear from leaders in biotech, venture capital, and IT for guidance on the tools and techniques that can help your startup address data management, compliance, data privacy, and ransomware. Watch on-demand sessions from Egnyte’s Life Sciences Summit: Breakthrough 2022, including a keynote on industry trends and predictions from IDC’s Nimita Limaye, to get practical advice that will help grow your startup. | What are the odds Merck actually buys Seagen? The analysts at Cowen asked investors, and according to the 16 who responded, the probability is about 65% that Merck’s reported interest in acquiring Seagen for around $40 billion will result in a deal. The majority expect an official announcement within a month.
The more important question might be: Can Merck actually buy Seagen? The Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly warned that it plans to take a hard look at pharmaceutical mergers, especially those in which a larger company bolsters its presence in a single therapeutic area. Merck, which markets the blockbuster cancer treatment Keytruda, acquiring Seagen, which is focused on cancers, seems to fit that description.
To that end, an antitrust attorney told the analysts at SVB that while the FTC is unlikely to outright block a such a deal, because Keytruda doesn’t directly compete with Seagen’s products, it is very almost certain to request information from both parties and apply the kind of scrutiny that could significantly delay an actual merger. | A vant is born Roivant, the constellation of biotech companies that has lost more than half its value since going public last year, has a plan to improve its fortunes: fewer drugs and more vants.
The news, disclosed yesterday, is that Roivant has begotten Priovant Therapeutics, a joint venture with Pfizer that will develop that company’s autoimmune drug brepocitinib. At the same time, Roivant discontinued a gene therapy for sickle cell disease, a cancer treatment, and a pair of early-stage dermatology drugs.
“We view the pipeline reprioritization positively,” begins SVB analyst David Risinger’s assessment of the moves. And, from a Wall Street perspective, Roivant’s decisions seem like an effort to address investors’ sources of skepticism: that the company has too many projects to track, and that too few of them are close to becoming products. With Priovant, Roivant gets a drug with Phase 3 data expected next year. And by cutting a handful of pipeline ideas, the company gets a little less diffuse. | More reads - 100 lawmakers ask HHS to use controversial federal laws to combat high drug prices. STAT
- Novartis will cut as many as 8,000 jobs under plan to save $1 billion by 2024. Bloomberg
- FDA classifies recall of GE's ventilator batteries as most serious. Reuters
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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