Ab­b­Vie will spend $700 mil­lion up­front, plus fu­ture pay­ments, on a trispe­cif­ic an­ti­body for blood can­cer from IGI Ther­a­peu­tics, adding to a slow but steady trend of deals for mul­ti-tar­get drugs.

Ab­b­Vie will get ex­clu­sive rights for IGI’s mul­ti­ple myelo­ma can­di­date in sev­er­al mar­kets, in­clud­ing North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. The New York biotech could al­so re­ceive up to $1.22 bil­lion in mile­stones as well as tiered dou­ble-dig­it roy­al­ties, ac­cord­ing to a Thurs­day re­lease.

Bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies for can­cer have been around for around a decade now. How­ev­er, in­ter­est has re­cent­ly shift­ed to­ward mul­ti­spe­cif­ic ap­proach­es, which can en­gage more than two tar­gets at once. IGI’s drug, called ISB 2001, tar­gets BC­MA and CD38 on can­cer cells and CD3 on T cells. That ap­proach has “the po­ten­tial to de­liv­er deep­er, more durable re­spons­es,” Ab­b­Vie’s Chief Sci­en­tif­ic Of­fi­cer Roopal Thakkar said in the press re­lease.

The num­bers aren’t all bad in biotech. But you’d be for­giv­en if you thought they were. And you’d be in good com­pa­ny.

Once again, Chris Doko­ma­ji­lar at Deal­For­ma has been check­ing the da­ta for us on what Q2 and the first half in­di­cate for the rest of 2025.

Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, deal­mak­ing is hold­ing up, par­tic­u­lar­ly for prime late-stage drugs, as M&A popped a bit in the first half of this year and li­cens­ing num­bers edged up in biotech. But once you look past deal­mak­ing, it’s a ques­tion of just how much the num­bers have erod­ed from last year — or last quar­ter.

Ven­ture in­vest­ing has cratered. The IPO par­ty, over for years now, has gone co­matose. PIPEs and fol­low-ons are post­ing mixed re­sults.

In a his­toric first, the FDA on Thurs­day re­leased about 200 nov­el and gener­ic drug re­jec­tion let­ters, buck­ing the agen­cy's for­mer un­will­ing­ness to re­lease the doc­u­ments.

But it's a small step as the let­ters are on­ly for drugs that have since been ap­proved, es­pe­cial­ly as com­pa­nies have claimed that the de­tails of the re­jec­tion let­ters are pro­pri­etary.

The re­lease, how­ev­er, comes as a wel­come re­lief to those dou­ble check­ing the ve­rac­i­ty of phar­ma com­pa­nies in their ini­tial press re­leas­es an­nounc­ing these pre­vi­ous­ly undis­closed doc­u­ments.

The FDA not­ed that ac­cord­ing to a 2015 analy­sis con­duct­ed by FDA re­searchers, drug com­pa­nies "avoid­ed men­tion­ing 85% of the FDA’s con­cerns about safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy when an­nounc­ing pub­licly that their ap­pli­ca­tion was not ap­proved. More­over, when FDA calls for a new clin­i­cal tri­al for safe­ty or ef­fi­ca­cy, that crit­i­cal in­for­ma­tion is not dis­closed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 40% of the time."