Welcome back to This Week in Biotech by Biotech Blueprint, edition 120, covering biotech and pharma news from September 25th to October 1, 2026.
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THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS 🔑
The three biggest checks written this week were all for options rather than assets. AstraZeneca invested $2 billion into Summit without buying ivonescimab, the drug everyone assumed it wanted. Back in July 2025 the rumored price for a full license was $15 billion. Instead AstraZeneca took an equity stake and the right to run combination trials. Sanofi paid Regeneron $1 billion upfront for four antibodies, only one of which has ever been tested in a person. And Novo paid Hengrui $300 million for an obesity pill that has never been dosed in a human at all. In every case the underlying biology is already proven, so these companies are buying is a position rather than a drug, which is a lot cheaper than a full license or an acquisition.
Same thing as last week (and several weeks before): Withhold thy data and be rewarded, publish and be punished. uniQure published four year Huntington’s data with all the numbers attached, and its primary endpoint lost statistical significance as patients dropped out of the comparison group. The stock fell about 40%. Kodiak Sciences announced that two wet macular degeneration drugs were noninferior to Eylea without publishing a single letter of visual acuity, and it jumped 62% premarket.
On the policy side, the administration’s drug pricing program came out much smaller than proposed. CMS finalized GLOBE, which ties Medicare payments for office-administered drugs to prices in 19 other countries, then wrote in waivers for any company already in a voluntary pricing agreement. Projected savings fell 96%, from $11.9 billion to about $440 million, and the number of manufacturers affected dropped from 19 to 4.
And lastly, Lilly’s amylin + tirzepatide combo hit 23.3% weight loss in patients with type 2 diabetes, who typically lose considerably less weight on these drugs than people without diabetes. Every competitor presenting at the European diabetes meeting in Milan landed between 10% and 13%.
No video today, I’m not feeling well. Thanks for reading Biotech Blueprint, and I’ll be back next week with more news from biotech and pharma.
BIOTECH/PHARMA NEWS 🧬
🔹 AstraZeneca is investing $2B in Summit without buying the drug. The money goes into convertible preferred stock priced at an effective $18.36 per common share, a 10% premium to where Summit had been trading. Summit keeps full ownership of ivonescimab. AstraZeneca gets a stake in the company plus the right to run combination trials. AstraZeneca will sponsor trials combining Summit’s ivonescimab, a PD-1/VEGF bispecific, with sonesitatug vedotin, its own Claudin 18.2 antibody drug conjugate, in gastric and biliary tract cancers, with costs shared. A non-binding memorandum covers more combinations with AstraZeneca’s antibody drug conjugates in lung, breast and gastrointestinal cancers. Summit rose from $15.48 to $18.51 premarket, up 19.6%, and originator Akeso gained 15.5% in Hong Kong. Summit’s US case still rests on global HARMONi overall survival data due in 2028, after China-only results the market has learned to discount. AstraZeneca got equity exposure and combination data without paying for a license. If HARMONi works, it owns a stake and the trial results, and if it doesn’t, it owns preferred stock.
🔹 Sanofi will pay Regeneron $1B upfront and up to $7B in milestones for four long-acting antibodies targeting IL-13, IL-4 or the IL-4 receptor, which is the same biology behind Dupixent. Costs and profits split 50/50, Regeneron leads R&D, Sanofi commercializes. The lead candidate is in an early eczema trial and the other three enter human testing in 2027. Dupixent sold $10.9B in the first half of 2026 and its key patents expire over the next five years, though the companies argue a patent thicket could stretch protection to 2045. The logic is lifecycle management: a longer-acting version of the same mechanism is the cleanest way to move patients onto a new drug before biosimilars arrive. The weakness is that nothing in the package yet demonstrates a dosing advantage, and RBC’s Brian Abrahams called the drugs “very early.” Regeneron fell 3.1% on a deal that pays it $1B, which tells you investors read this as Sanofi worrying about the patent cliff rather than as a vote of confidence in the new molecules.
🔹 Novo licensed HRS-1596 from Hengrui, a once weekly oral GLP-1/GIP dual agonist, for $300M upfront and up to $2.6B in total, taking rights outside China, Taiwan and nearby markets. The drug is described as “Phase 1 ready,” meaning no human data exists. Novo is betting on weekly dosing. A weekly pill would combine Wegovy’s schedule with an oral format and compete directly with Zepbound’s mechanism. The deal landed a week after a capital markets day where Novo guided growth only “broadly in line with industry peers” and the stock fell about 5%. Novo also picked up obesity assets from Kallyope, which rebranded as TriGemX Bio with $94M for migraine. Novo is buying the next gen lane it failed to build internally, and the Chinese pipeline is again the cheapest place to buy it, in a year when Chinese-designed drugs make up roughly half the global pipeline.
🔹 CMS finalized a program called GLOBE, which ties what Medicare pays for certain drugs to what those same drugs cost in 19 other countries. It covers Part B, meaning drugs administered in a doctor’s office or hospital rather than picked up at a pharmacy, and it starts Jan 2027 in regions covering about 25% of Medicare beneficiaries. The original proposal projected $11.9B in savings over seven years. The final rule projects $440M, which is a 96% cut. The reason is the waivers. Any manufacturer already in a voluntary pricing agreement with the administration gets exempted, which drops the number of companies subject to the rule from roughly 19 to 4. Orphan drugs, plasma products, some cell and gene therapies, and biologics already facing biosimilar competition are excluded too. So the most favored nation deals companies signed in August and September turn out to have been the price of buying out of this, which makes those deals look even better for the companies than they did at the time.
🔹 Beam sued YolTech Therapeutics, its U.S. licensee Serapha Bio, CEO Yuxuan Wu and former Beam scientist Zi Jun Wang in Massachusetts federal court on September 25. The complaint alleges Wang founded YolTech while still employed at Beam and accessed dozens of records outside her area, “including at night and on weekends,” then filed patents five months after leaving. The disputed asset, SERP-01, edits the same nucleotide at the same location as Beam’s clinical stage BEAM-302 in alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a genetic disorder that causes lung and liver damage. Serapha, backed by $230M from RA Capital and RTW for a reverse merger listing, plans a Phase 2/3 trial in late 2026 or early 2027 and “categorically refutes” the claims.
🔹 uniQure published four year data on AMT-130 in Huntington’s disease, and the signal weakened. At 48 months, the 12 high dose patients showed 44% slowing on the prespecified composite disease rating scale versus matched external controls, with p=0.144, which is not statistically significant. Total Functional Capacity slowed 61% with a nominal p of 0.008, and analyses adjusted for missing data gave 54% and 68%. For comparison, at 36 months 15 patients had shown 80% slowing on the composite scale. So the effect looks smaller the longer the follow up runs. The bigger problem is that the external control group has 53% missing data at 48 months, and the FDA had already called the comparator distorted when it asked for a sham-controlled trial. Five high dose patients experienced treatment-related serious central nervous system inflammation, all of which resolved. Shares fell about 40% at the open to just under $24, roughly $1B of value. The September accelerated approval application now has a decision due in about 8 months, and the durability question has become a statistics question.
🔹 Kodiak Sciences reported that two of its eye drugs matched Eylea, the current standard treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration, in a trial of about 690 patients who hadn't been treated before. Both hit the one year primary endpoint on visual acuity. Eylea requires injections directly into the eye every one to two months, so dosing interval is the real commercial question, and 54% of Zenkuda patients stretched to six months between doses. Intraocular inflammation, the complication that hurt earlier long-acting competitors, ran 0% and 0.4%. What Kodiak did not disclose is letter gains for any arm, or the noninferiority margin. That omission matters for a company whose earlier drug failed this exact comparison against Eylea and lost about 80% of its value. Combined with the GLOW2 diabetic retinopathy win in March, Kodiak plans a single Q4 2026 application covering wet AMD, diabetic retinopathy and retinal vein occlusion. The stock was up 62% premarket at $52.44. Clean safety signal, but the vision numbers remain unpublished.
🔹 Lilly combined tirzepatide with eloralintide, an amylin analog. Amylin is a hormone that works alongside insulin to signal fullness. In 367 adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes over 48 weeks, the combination produced 23.3% weight loss, about 54 pounds, versus 14.8% on tirzepatide alone and 3.0% on placebo. A1C fell 2.9 points from a baseline of 8.1%, compared with 2.4 on tirzepatide. Eloralintide on its own peaked at 12.3%. What makes 23.3% striking is the population. People with type 2 diabetes typically lose several percentage points less weight on these drugs than people without it, so this number beats retatrutide’s 18.8% in TRIUMPH-2, which enrolled a similar group. The cost is tolerability. Discontinuation ran between 10.8% and 27.0% across the combination arms versus 2.9% on tirzepatide alone, which is why the Phase 3 starting by year-end will use a slower dose escalation. For comparison, everything else at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting landed well below that. Boehringer’s survodutide at 13%, AbbVie’s amylin candidate up to 10% at 12 weeks, Zealand and Roche’s petrelintide at 10.7% over 42 weeks. Lilly is mostly competing with its own pipeline at this point.
Have a great rest of your week and thanks for reading Biotech Blueprint!
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Front cover image source: Getty Images
Super interesting to see the Novo deal (300M up front for 'just' preclinical data): as former university tech transfer professional I always worked on the assumption that big pharma was only interested in inlicensing when the licensing package contains human clinical data, but I guess when the preclinical package is so valuable and interesting, other rules are at play.