Re­gen­eron is dou­bling down on its ge­net­ics re­search am­bi­tions by agree­ing to buy most of 23andMe’s busi­ness out of bank­rupt­cy.

Re­gen­eron is best known for de­vel­op­ing block­buster drugs like Dupix­ent and Eylea rather than sell­ing sali­va-test kits. The Tar­ry­town, NY-based biotech has min­i­mal ex­pe­ri­ence, or pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed in­ter­est, in the world of di­rect-to-con­sumer health­care. The agree­ment in­cludes Re­gen­eron car­ry­ing on all con­sumer genome ser­vices un­in­ter­rupt­ed, ac­cord­ing to the press re­lease.

Re­gen­eron’s ex­ec­u­tives weren’t avail­able for an in­ter­view on the deal — at least for now, as the deal makes its way through the court’s process­es. It still needs to be fi­nal­ized in bank­rupt­cy court, but Re­gen­eron ex­pects to close the $256 mil­lion ac­qui­si­tion in the third quar­ter.

Ab­b­Vie's de­fense of its megablock­buster Hu­mi­ra may go down in the his­to­ry books as the poster child for block­ing biosim­i­lar com­pe­ti­tion, but the launch of six Ste­lara biosim­i­lars this year shows how com­peti­tors have learned from that ex­pe­ri­ence.

Since launch­ing ear­li­er this year, the six Ste­lara biosim­i­lars on the mar­ket are al­ready gain­ing trac­tion against the John­son & John­son bi­o­log­ic, which is used to treat a va­ri­ety of au­toim­mune dis­eases and last year sold more than $10 bil­lion.

Cig­na's pri­vate-la­bel dis­trib­u­tor Qual­lent and Op­tum's pri­vate-la­bel dis­trib­u­tor Nu­vaila are both ready to go with Ste­lara biosim­i­lar deals made ear­li­er this year, and CVS' sub­sidiary Cor­davis, which cracked Ab­b­Vie's hold on Hu­mi­ra, could po­ten­tial­ly fol­low suit, al­though the com­pa­ny did­n't re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

Boehringer In­gel­heim claimed two Phase 3 wins for its PDE4 in­hibitor in fi­brot­ic lung dis­eases, but some Wall Street an­a­lysts said the can­di­date’s “mod­est” ef­fi­ca­cy and lim­it­ed com­bi­na­tion po­ten­tial could ham­per its re­al-world use in one of the in­di­ca­tions.

Da­ta pre­sent­ed on neran­domi­last for the treat­ment of id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis showed sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant re­sults in two dif­fer­ent dos­ing reg­i­mens. The 18 mg dose of the drug achieved an av­er­age 68.8 ml dif­fer­ence from place­bo in a lung func­tion test called forced vi­tal ca­pac­i­ty at 52 weeks, while the 9 mg dose at­tained a 44.9 ml dif­fer­ence.

The Ger­man drug­mak­er on Sun­day shared the da­ta from its FI­BRONEER-IPF study of neran­domi­last at the Amer­i­can Tho­racic So­ci­ety meet­ing in San Fran­cis­co. The com­pa­ny first re­vealed the tri­al met its pri­ma­ry end­point in Sep­tem­ber 2024. It has al­ready filed for FDA ap­proval in IPF.

Af­ter more than a month of wait­ing and ne­go­ti­a­tions with US reg­u­la­tors, No­vavax has gained FDA ap­proval for its Covid shot.

But it’s for a tighter pop­u­la­tion than the com­pa­ny had asked for, and sig­nals how much hard­er it may be for vac­cine mak­ers to sat­is­fy the agency un­der Com­mis­sion­er Mar­ty Makary and HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The shot was ap­proved for adults 65 and old­er and for peo­ple aged 12 to 64 who have at least one health con­di­tion that puts them at in­creased risk of se­vere ill­ness from Covid. No­vavax played down the tight­ened pop­u­la­tion, say­ing in a state­ment Sun­day that peo­ple at high­er risk are more like­ly to seek out vac­ci­na­tion.

The FDA's ac­tion al­so trig­gers a $175 mil­lion mile­stone pay­ment from Sanofi.