🤑Biotech M&A is hot, and we saw another $10 billion deal this week when Vertex snapped up the endocrinology company Crinetics. It’s the largest acquisition in Vertex’s history, more than double its previous largest in 2024, when it acquired Alpine Immune Sciences for $4.9 billion. The buyout gives Vertex an acromegaly medicine called Palsonify, as well as a pipeline of endocrinology drugs spread across all stages of clinical development. The deal also represents the company’s clearest and boldest step toward the upper echelon of the biopharma industry, Max Gelman writes. 

Meanwhile, Novartis also got into the deal action, saying this week it will spend $1.1 billion upfront to buy Myricx Bio, a platform biotech that it says can design antibody-drug conjugate payloads offering an edge over current approaches. The ADC candidates carry an NMT inhibitor, which Novartis says could help address resistance to payloads such as TOPO-1 and tubulin. Myricx has two lead preclinical programs that separately target B7-H3 and HER2. 

This week’s activity brings the total to four buyouts so far in July, building on the nearly four dozen companies that got acquired in the first half of the year, biotech correspondent Kyle LaHucik writes. So far, 2026 is well on pace to surpass the 61 deals made last year. Oncology saw the most activity, with a dozen cancer deals exceeding $48 billion in all. It's not only the volume of deals that's notable, but also the size: Pharma companies have made three $10 billion acquisitions in the past month. 

You can thank Eli Lilly and its 11 deals for much of the recent spree, as the company becomes a force in one area where it hasn’t historically been the main player: M&A. Read more from Kyle here.

🪏They say that the way to make money in a gold rush is to open a shop selling picks and shovels, senior biopharma journalist Elizabeth Cairns wrote this week. In the GLP-1 boom, that means developing drugs designed to help obesity patients retain their muscle tissue. Biohaven is hopeful that its candidate taldefgrobep alfa can take on next-generation obesity drugs, including a similar muscle-boosting drug from Eli Lilly. 

Taldefgrobep should have Phase 2 results later this year. Unusually, Biohaven is testing the drug as a monotherapy, rather than in combination with a GLP-1. Several other companies, including Roche, Scholar Rock, Regeneron and Veru, are testing their muscle-boosting drugs alongside incretins. And Eli Lilly’s bimagrumab study also had a combo arm using Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, which yielded weight loss of 22% at 72 weeks.

Biohaven has nothing against combination approaches, SVP of clinical development Peter Ackerman told Endpoints News. But the company wanted to “better characterize exactly what we can do in terms of body composition change” with monotherapy, he said. GLP-1 combo trials with taldefgrobep are in the works, but more details will have to wait until the current Phase 2 trial reads out.

‘Taking on the big guy’: Even if Biohaven gets an approval, there could be a half-dozen new obesity drugs to contend with by then, Elizabeth writes. But Biohaven isn’t intimidated. “I think Biohaven has always taken on the big guy,” Ackerman said. He cited the example of Nurtec ODT, the migraine drug Biohaven got approved in 2020, before it was bought by Pfizer. “We’re not afraid to play in those spaces,” he added.

🔎Krazati, a first-generation KRAS inhibitor, was given accelerated approval for colorectal cancer in 2024. But in April, Endpoints News reported the drug failed its confirmatory study. Now, this past week, Bristol Myers detailed the failure in full: Krazati missed both its dual primary endpoints of progression-free survival and overall survival. The failure is likely to put Krazati’s colorectal cancer approval at risk. 

Patients taking Krazati plus another drug, the EGFR inhibitor cetuximab, saw their tumors return faster — and did not survive longer — than those who received chemotherapy. While more patients responded overall to Krazati, the outcomes seen did not translate into long-term survival benefits. What all this means, in trial jargon terms, was that median PFS for the Krazati arm was 7.5 months, compared to 8.1 months on standard of care. Median OS, meanwhile, was 21.6 months for Krazati and 21.7 months in the chemo arm. Read more here.

🤝The Hong Kong biotech unveiled drug development and sales pacts with two UK pharma companies this week. Under the first deal, Sino will license an investigational PDE3/4 inhibitor to AstraZeneca for $200 million upfront.  AstraZeneca will get exclusive rights to develop, make and sell the asset — a candidate for respiratory disorders — outside China. In return, Sino stands to get milestone payments worth up to $1.9 billion, plus tiered royalties. The deal also allows AstraZeneca to take global rights to unspecified future programs.

The second deal moves Sino’s existing collaboration with GSK from the liver to the lungs. The biotech will take sales rights in mainland China for two of GSK’s marketed drugs: Trelegy Ellipta and Anoro Ellipta. The companies kept mum about the financial terms of the deal. Sino said it will explore more opportunities with GSK for assets in Sino’s pipeline outside China, and hopes to build a long-term strategic relationship. For more details on the two deals, check out Elizabeth Cairns’ story here.