| |   | Hello, everyone. Damian here with an update on the Merck-Seagen saga, a price check on FDA expediency, and a note on diction. | | | Merck and Seagen’s summer dalliance is losing steam  Investors’ faith that Merck will acquire Seagen is bottoming out, based on the latter’s stock price, as a courtship that reportedly began in June threatens to stretch into the fall.
Seagen has been trading below $160 since Friday, when Bloomberg reported that talks with Merck had stalled after the two parties failed to agree on an acquisition price. Back in July, the Wall Street Journal reported Merck had floated an offer of about $200 a share, and Seagen has since traded toward and away from that number in keeping with investors’ expectations, reaching into the $180s in late July.
Seagen's recent average of about $155 represents its cheapest price since the Journal first reported Merck’s interest on June 17, suggesting Wall Street’s optimism for a deal has reached a nadir. | A promising target looks a little shaky Kymera Therapeutics went public at a roughly $1.5 billion valuation on the promise that it could succeed where other companies had failed and craft drugs for hard-to-reach proteins. But an update from a rival program has seeded doubts about Kymera’s most advanced therapy.
Yesterday, Pfizer disclosed data from a medicine that, like Kymera’s KT-474, targets the protein IRAK4 to treat inflammatory disease. After 16 weeks, Pfizer’s drug proved no better than placebo at relieving the symptoms of hidradenitis suppurativa, an inflammatory skin disease, leading the company to discontinue development.
Kymera, whose drug is designed to degrade IRAK4 rather than block it directly, fell about 10% on the news. To SVB analyst Mike Kratky, Pfizer’s data have “slightly negative” implications for Kymera, which expects to have data of its own in the fourth quarter, and will only fuel the debate over whether IRAK4 is a winning target. | This fall, join STAT live in DC Learn from the researchers, patient advocates, and lawmakers driving the next breakthroughs in rare disease research this September 15. Stay once the conversation is complete for a networking and cocktail hour. Purchase your ticket now (or unlock a free pass as a STAT+ subscriber). | In FDA reviews, four months is worth about $100 million At least according to the market.
For roughly the past decade, the FDA has offered a reward to companies that develop treatments for rare and neglected disease: Upon winning approval, they get a coupon that can be redeemed for a shortened agency review, and they’re free to sell that coupon to the highest bidder. And, after some gyrations in the early years of the program, that coupon is understood to be worth about $100 million.
The latest datapoint came yesterday when Marinus Pharmaceuticals sold its priority-review voucher for $110 million to an undisclosed buyer. That’s the same price BioMarin Pharmaceutical got earlier this year in a similar sale, and it’s in keeping with the last 10 transactions, which have ranged between $95 million and $111 million.
That could be instructive for Bluebird Bio, which just won such a voucher and is expected to receive another later this year. The company, which has cut into its spending to keep the doors open, could use the cash. | An unprecedented trend of transformational importance Science has a linguistic problem, and it’s only getting worse.
As STAT’s Theresa Gaffney reports, that problem is hype, and it comes in the shape of words like “unprecedented,” “incredible,” and “devastating.” According to a new study looking at 35 years of successful grant applications to the NIH, the prevalence of such adjectives has increased by an average of 1,300%.
The issue of rhetorical inflation has implications for science, researchers said. If only the most overwrought applications get funded, scientists are incentivized to partake in an arms race of overstatement. And if researchers keep crying “unprecedented” at every opportunity, who’s going to believe them when an actual breakthrough does come around?
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| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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