Ep. 391 - China deals, Beam lawsuit, MFN models, Nobel winners

Jeff Kranmer (0:01)

This year's China Deal Count already exceeds that of prior years, and it's only October. Pharma partnering in China is getting earlier and broader, as seen in a trio of deals last week by Merck, Novo and Novartis. We'll discuss the latest in China Deal Trends, plus allegations of trade theft as Beam sizes up a competitor from China, and small globe big precedent. The Trump administration's globe model has shrunk, and in the process, the threat it poses to biomedical innovation has become clearer, and a group of neuroscientists wins the Nobel in physiology or medicine for their discoveries related to light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Joining me to discuss all of this are Editor-in-Chief Simone Fishburne, Executive Editor Selena Koch, Washington Editor Steve Usden, Lauren Martz, Executive Director of BioPharma Intelligence, and I'm Jeff Kranmer, Executive Editor and Host of the BioCentury This Week Podcast. Okay. Something new for you on the BioCentury website. Simone, you want to tell folks about it?

Simone Fishburne (1:30)

Well, I think this is the perfect audience to tell folks, because if you like listening to us here, then you can listen to the pulse of wisdom that Steve and Lauren and Selena and everybody put in our content. Specifically, all of our articles are now available for subscribers in an audio version. So if you don't want to read it, you can listen to it. It's not actually Steve's voice, but we are thinking of cloning that.

Maybe having it throughout the website there. Moment it's AI generated, nice lady. Or maybe we'll just change Steve's voice to the AI lady.

Jeff Kranmer (2:04)

Maybe that's what we should do.

Simone Fishburne (2:06)

Either way, yeah. So this is one of a few feature upgrades we're making in particular for subscribers. So go ahead, listen to the things we write. You can actually save them in a saved articles and listen to them later. That's a way to coordinate that. Go ahead and try that out. You said on the website, which is true, Jeff, but you can also do it via mobile.

Lauren Martz (2:29)

Yeah.

Jeff Kranmer (2:31)

Nothing if not mobile. So yeah, I've enjoyed it too.

I've been fiddling around with that on the Wall Street Journal and the Economists and other things. So it's really fun.

Lauren Martz (2:43)

Sorry.

Simone Fishburne (2:44)

One more thing, Jeff, that we forgot to say and you forgot to jump in and remind me, is that for our Asia subscribers, it is also available in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. We did actually have people test it, who speak better than Jeff or me, all of those three languages. So we hope that that's a useful addition.

Jeff Kranmer (3:10)

It was fun putting my father-in-law to work, getting him to check out the Korean. He was like, yes, this is a very incisive article on biotechnology. I was like, that's what we do here.

So I can vouch for the Korean. It's good enough to please a retired doctor in Tennessee.

Okay, Pharma partnering in China. We saw the deals from Merck, Novo, Novartis last week, and Lauren thought, hey, what's going on here? So she took a deep dive, looking at all the deals over the past few years, and we should say, disclose deals. As I know, there's probably a lot of deals happening under the surface that companies don't need to put out there. Lauren, what did you learn?

Lauren Martz (3:57)

Thanks, Jeff. Specifically, we looked at deals by multinational pharmas by the list of 21 companies that we generally use for these types of analyses.

It was specifically the pharma deals with China-based biotechs that went into this. As you mentioned, there were three last week.

But when we lined them up for the past four years, there's just a huge increase. I think we have nine more deals already this year to date than we had last year. Of course, there has been an overall increase in the number of deals that pharmas have signed during the period. But this is just demonstrating the trend that we all see happening, that we all know is happening. So I think something interesting that we noticed specifically about the three deals last week, as you sort of mentioned, is that these were relatively big deals. They all had upfront payments of over 300 million or more with total deal values over $2 billion. One of them was over $7 billion. And these were all really early stage deals. So just one of the three, the most recently announced deal between Novartis and Abogen, for an RNA encoded T cell engager, had any clinical data whatsoever. So that one had some limited data from two ongoing investigator initiated trials in China, which is one of the big selling points of doing these deals. But the other two were preclinical stage assets. And another point is that these were in three different modalities and three different disease areas. So when you look back a few years at our analysis of what pharmas were sourcing from China, it was a ton of antibody-based therapies and it was a ton of cancer assets. And so I think it's really interesting that we're sort of looking everywhere.