Top ten biopharma deals of 2024 (2024)

The biggest Q1 deal, with a total value of $4.1 billion, was announced in January when Argo Biopharmaceutical, a privately held biotechnology company based in Shanghai, granted Novartis exclusive rights to develop and commercialize two clinical-stage RNA-interference candidates targeting cardiovascular diseases.

Novartis is paying Argo $185 million upfront for rights to a phase 1/2a prospect outside of China and other nearby territories, and global rights to a phase 1 program, with an option to license candidates for up to two additional cardiovascular targets.

Since it was founded in 2021, Argo has been using its small-interfering RNA (siRNA) platform technology known as RADS (RNA molecules with superior Activity, Durability, and Safety) to build a pipeline of over 20 siRNA drug candidates for several indications, including cardiovascular diseases, rare diseases, central nervous system (CNS) diseases, and metabolic diseases. Three of its five most advanced candidates are in the cardiovascular disease space.

Drugs based on the RADS platform can silence target genes involved in disease pathogenesis over long periods of time so patients may only require one injection per year. This deal will bolster Novartis’ therapeutics pipeline for cardiovascular disease.

Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH also bets big on siRNA therapies. In a deal worth $2 billion, Suzhou Ribo Life Science (Ribo) and Ribocure Pharmaceuticals granted Boehringer exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize siRNA therapies using Ribo’s RIBO-GalSTAR platform for the treatment of non-alcoholic or metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (NASH/MASH).

The RIBO-GalSTAR platform enables the development of siRNA therapeutics that can target disease-causing genes specifically in liver cells, potentially leading to new treatment options that prevent NASH progression and restore liver function.

Companies growing their oncology portfolio

Four of the top ten highest value deals last quarter (Table 1) are in the cancer field; three involve technology platforms to discover new cancer therapies and one will advance the development of Umoja Biopharma’s in-situ-generated chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies.

Roche paid MOMA Therapeutics, a US-based biotechnology company focused on targeting the molecular machines that underlie human disease, $66 million up front and potential milestone payments and royalties exceeding $2 billion for exclusive, worldwide rights to develop cancer therapies using MOMA’s proprietary KnowledgeBase platform.

MOMA’s platform is being used to target ATPases—a difficult-to-drug class of enzymes involved in intracellular energy transfer—by exploiting the dependence of these proteins on coordinated, stepwise changes in structural states to carry out their function. The five-year deal with Roche aims to identify and develop novel drug targets involved in promoting cancer cell growth and survival.

Gilead Sciences has signed a research partnership with clinical-stage oncology company Merus to discover two new antibody-based drugs against T cells that are capable of binding three targets at once, using Merus’ Triclonics platform. Merus will receive $56 million upfront cash and $25 million in equity, and is eligible for up to $1.5 billion in potential milestone payments and royalties.

By binding to multiple targets, bispecific and trispecific antibodies can have more than one mechanism of action and potentially elicit more robust and specific anti-tumor immune responses. To date, Merus has advanced seven bispecific antibodies to the clinic; its lead cancer drug candidate petosemtamab, which targets epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the leucine-rich repeat containing G-protein-coupled receptor 5 (LGR5), has shown encouraging activity in patients with advanced head and neck cancer.

Merck KGaA is also investing in discovery platform technology to expand its oncology portfolio. By partnering with Caris Discovery, the therapeutic research arm of Caris Life Sciences (Caris), Merck KGaA seeks to accelerate the discovery and development of first-in-class antibody‒drug conjugates (ADCs) for cancer patients. In a deal worth $1.4 billion, Merck KGaA, will receive an exclusive global license to develop, manufacture, and commercialize ADC therapeutics against selected targets for the treatment of cancer discovered using Caris’ proprietary ADAPT (Adaptive Dynamic Artificial Polyligand Targeting) platform, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning capabilities.

AbbVie’s deal with Umoja Biopharma also made the top ten list. Umoja is eligible for up to $1.44 billion for granting AbbVie an exclusive, worldwide option to license the development and commercialization of its UB-VV111 CAR T cell therapy using the VivoVec gene delivery platform for the treatment of hematologic cancers. The companies will additionally develop up to 4 additional CAR-T cell therapies for AbbVie-selected targets.

Umoja’s VivoVec platform uses lentiviral particles to deliver CAR payloads directly to human T cells, enabling them to manufacture their own cancer-targeting CARs in vivo. This approach has the potential to expand the patient populations that could benefit from CAR T cell approaches as it eliminates the complexity, time, and expense of modifying T cells ex vivo and delivering them to patients.

An AI-first approach to drug discovery

In Q1 of 2024, both Eli Lilly and Novartis signed agreements with the London-based drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs, to gain rights to its next-generation AlphaFold model and AI technology.

Following upfront payments of $45 million and $37.5 million from Eli Lilly and Novartis, respectively, Isomorphic will apply its virtual screens and small-molecule design approaches to develop small-molecule therapies against undisclosed targets. The company will be eligible for up to $1.7 billion in performance-based milestone payments from Eli Lilly and up to $1.2 billion from Novartis.

Since its release in 2020, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold—a freely available AI system developed to predict the three-dimensional (3D) structure of proteins from their amino-acid sequences—has drastically accelerated understanding of protein interactions. Working in collaboration with Google DeepMind, Isomorphic is developing a more powerful AlphaFold model with improved accuracy that also covers small molecules and nucleic acids, and will aid the rational design of novel therapeutics.

The R&D partnership landscape

After spiking in 2020‒2021, the number of partnerships between biopharma therapeutics and platform companies has remained steady with between 100 and 150 deals being signed per quarter (Fig. 1). The total value of these deals has increased from just under $110 billion in 2018 and 2019 to over $160 billion in 2020‒2022, with a record $178.4 billion in 2023.

The total deal value in Q1 of 2024 ($36 billion) was slightly higher than in Q1 of 2023 ($34.9 billion). These values are dwarfed by the total for Q4 of 2023 ($72.3 billion), which included a mega-deal between Merck and Daiichi Sankyo to develop and commercialize three cancer drugs worth $22 billion.

Interestingly, the average upfront payments seem to be increasing after they dipped in 2021 and 2022—when they were $67.75 million and $54.25 million, respectively, compared to $88.5 million in 2020—as in 2023 the average upfront cash and equity was $83.5 million. This trend looks set to continue in 2024 as the Q1 average upfront cash and equity was $58 million compared to $41 million in the same quarter last year. These data highlight the eagerness of biopharma companies to expand their pipelines by making use of platform technologies to identify new drug candidates and improve the delivery of existing ones.