Al­though Mer­ck and Terns Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals are part of biotech's M&A surge, the $6.7 bil­lion deal did­n't near­ly play out the way ei­ther an­tic­i­pat­ed.

Mer­ck de­cid­ed to sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er its of­fer for the biotech by about 13% af­ter see­ing up­dat­ed clin­i­cal da­ta that changed the out­look for Tern­s' in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al on­col­o­gy drug, called TERN-701, ac­cord­ing to SEC fil­ings on Tues­day. The doc­u­ments show one of the rare in­stances in which a com­pa­ny drops its of­fer price dur­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions.

The New Jer­sey phar­ma gi­ant will gain ac­cess to an ex­per­i­men­tal chron­ic myeloid leukemia (CML) med­i­cine that could one day com­pete with No­var­tis' block­buster treat­ment Scem­blix. But the da­ta led an­oth­er po­ten­tial ac­quir­er, an un­named "large phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny" re­ferred to as "Par­ty C," to back out of deal talks. Pri­or to this, a few oth­er com­pa­nies — Par­ties A, B, D and E — had told Terns that they weren't in­ter­est­ed in a deal, ac­cord­ing to the reg­u­la­to­ry pa­per­work.

In its third ac­qui­si­tion of 2026, Gilead is spend­ing $3.15 bil­lion up­front to snag a next-gen­er­a­tion an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate plat­form from Ger­man start­up Tubu­lis.

The Cal­i­for­nia bio­phar­ma could pay out an­oth­er $1.85 bil­lion down the road to Tubu­lis share­hold­ers if all goes well with the ac­qui­si­tion, which was an­nounced Tues­day morn­ing. Tubu­lis raised a $401 mil­lion Se­ries C last year, had its sights on a po­ten­tial IPO, and re­cruit­ed Roche on­col­o­gy ex­ec­u­tive Charles Fuchs as its chief med­ical of­fi­cer.

“To un­leash the full po­ten­tial of the plat­form, we need a lot of horse­pow­er. We need a lot of re­sources that we cur­rent­ly don’t have,” Tubu­lis CEO Do­minik Schu­mach­er said in an in­ter­view with End­points News. “I’m 100% sure that we could have built lots of those re­sources over time, but we just didn’t want to waste any time to get these med­i­cines to pa­tients.”

Three aca­d­e­m­ic cen­ters be­lieve they may have dis­cov­ered new ways to heal ag­ing joints. Now the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is fund­ing clin­i­cal tri­als to test these ex­per­i­men­tal re­gen­er­a­tive med­i­cines in os­teoarthri­tis.

Teams from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Boul­der and Co­lum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty could col­lec­tive­ly re­ceive more than $100 mil­lion from the Ad­vanced Re­search Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a fed­er­al agency that funds high-risk and high-re­ward med­ical re­search.

The project, known as Nov­el In­no­va­tions for Tis­sue Re­gen­er­a­tion in Os­teoarthri­tis (NI­TRO), be­gan in 2024 dur­ing the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion, and some of the fund­ing was al­ready doled out two years ago. While five groups were se­lect­ed for the ini­tial pre­clin­i­cal work, on­ly three will move in­to clin­i­cal stud­ies, which are ex­pect­ed to be­gin with­in 18 months.

Plus, news about Ver­tex and Halozyme, Were­wolf, and Re­gen­eron:

No­vo Nordisk launch­es high-dose We­govy in the US: The 7.2 mg in­jectable form of the GLP-1 ag­o­nist is now avail­able in the US to treat obe­si­ty pa­tients via tele­health providers in­clud­ing No­vo’s own Novo­Care Phar­ma­cy, as well as brick-and-mor­tar phar­ma­cies. It will cost $399 per month for cash-pay cus­tomers, but pa­tients will work their way up to this lev­el from low­er, cheap­er dos­es. The new dose was ap­proved swift­ly via the Com­mis­sion­er’s Na­tion­al Pri­or­i­ty Vouch­er pro­gram in March, based on piv­otal tri­al da­ta show­ing weight loss of about 19% at 72 weeks, us­ing an in­tent-to-treat analy­sis. — Eliz­a­beth Cairns