The typ­i­cal em­ploy­ee at a pub­licly trad­ed life sci­ences com­pa­ny made $224,729 last year, ac­cord­ing to an End­points News analy­sis of pay trends across the in­dus­try.

End­points re­viewed hun­dreds of an­nu­al proxy fil­ings, find­ing 177 bio­phar­mas that dis­closed me­di­an pay for their work­force. The me­di­an across those re­port­ing com­pa­nies was $224,729, a 13% in­crease from $199,048 in 2023. Even with the biotech mar­ket set­tling in­to the fourth year of a down­turn, the da­ta show re­main­ing em­ploy­ees are ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly well-paid. The typ­i­cal drug in­dus­try work­er made more than five times the me­di­an Amer­i­can’s in­come of $42,220.

There are lim­its to the com­par­i­son, though, as End­points’ analy­sis on­ly in­cludes pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies that are re­quired to dis­close this pay in­for­ma­tion. This doesn’t in­clude the vast ma­jor­i­ty of for­eign-fil­ing com­pa­nies, as well as many small­er biotechs that are ex­empt from dis­clos­ing me­di­an pay.

Mer­ck is boost­ing its res­pi­ra­to­ry port­fo­lio with a $10 bil­lion takeover of com­mer­cial-stage drug­mak­er Verona Phar­ma, the com­pa­nies said Wednes­day morn­ing.

It sig­nals Mer­ck’s on­go­ing ap­petite for large deals to gain ac­cess to near-term sales, but al­so to pad its fu­ture rev­enue stream as the world’s top-sell­ing drug, the can­cer med­i­cine Keytru­da, comes off patent lat­er this decade. It’s the in­dus­try’s sec­ond-largest deal this year, be­hind John­son & John­son’s $14.6 bil­lion pur­chase of In­tra-Cel­lu­lar in Jan­u­ary.

The New Jer­sey phar­ma gi­ant is buy­ing in­to a fresh­ly com­mer­cial com­pa­ny. Verona snagged FDA ap­proval for Ohtu­vayre 13 months ago. The drug is ap­proved as a main­te­nance treat­ment for adults with chron­ic ob­struc­tive pul­monary dis­ease, or COPD. The North Car­oli­na and Lon­don biotech is al­so test­ing the in­haled med­i­cine for non-cys­tic fi­bro­sis bronchiec­ta­sis.

Rev­o­lu­tion Med­i­cines has be­come one of the in­dus­try's most valu­able pre-com­mer­cial com­pa­nies thanks to its pipeline of clin­i­cal-stage can­cer drugs. CEO Mark Gold­smith is press­ing ahead on what could be next by sign­ing a new re­search deal with a lead­ing AI-fo­cused biotech.

Rev­o­lu­tion will pair its unique li­brary of mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures and da­ta with the AI mod­els de­vel­oped by Iambic Ther­a­peu­tics, the two biotechs an­nounced Wednes­day. Rev­o­lu­tion will pay $25 mil­lion in the short term to Iambic through a mix of up­front pay­ments and near-term mile­stones.

Most R&D part­ner­ships are struc­tured around ad­vanc­ing spe­cif­ic mol­e­cules. This deal fo­cus­es more on AI and da­ta than on de­liv­er­ing com­pounds. Iambic will train a cus­tomized ver­sion of Neu­ralPLex­er, its AI mod­el that pre­dicts bio­mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures, on Rev­o­lu­tion's da­ta.

Rhythm Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals said Wednes­day its oral can­di­date for a rare form of obe­si­ty pro­duced “sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and clin­i­cal­ly mean­ing­ful” re­duc­tions in BMI in a mid-stage tri­al.

The biotech al­so said that it is fine-tun­ing the for­mu­la­tion of its MCR4 ag­o­nist, dubbed bi­vame­lagon, ahead of a Phase 3 pro­gram with an eye on im­prov­ing its tol­er­a­bil­i­ty.

The drug is be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed for ac­quired hy­po­thal­a­m­ic obe­si­