Haisco Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd.

Taylor Tieden for BioSpace The star of the licensing agreement, a small-molecule gamma-secretase modulator, will help buff Eli Lilly’s position in Alzheimer’s disease, currently headlined by its anti-amyloid antibody Kisunla. Lilly is keeping its spending spree going, this time investing in a back-loaded Alzheimer’s disease deal with Swedish biotech AlzeCure Pharma. The alliance, announced Tuesday , will involve $10 million in cash from the pharma, as well as unspecified development and commercial milestone payments, resulting in a total deal that could top $1 billion. AlzeCure will also be eligible for tiered mid-single-digit royalties on sales, according to the press release. The centerpiece of the licensing agreement is ACD680, a small-molecule modulator of the gamma-secretase enzyme that works by lowering the production of Aβ42, a pathologic form of amyloid-beta that acts as the building blocks of characteristic Alzheimer’s plaques in the brain. ACD680 also helps boost the production of shorter forms of amyloid-beta that don’t contribute to the toxic clumps. Gamma-secretase modulators such as ACD680 have a “strong genetic link” to Alzheimer’s disease, AlzeCure CSO Johan Sandin said in a prepared statement Tuesday. In the long term, CEO Martin Jönsson added that the drug could also serve as a preventive treatment for the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The AlzeCure alliance is designed to expand Lilly’s Alzheimer’s disease portfolio, currently anchored by its FDA-approved anti-amyloid antibody Kisunla. The drug was given the regulatory go-ahead in July 2024 —about a year and a half behind its main competitor Leqembi, owned by Biogen and Eisai. Leqembi won full FDA approval in July 2023 , becoming the first disease-modifying Alzheimer’s therapy to secure such a regulatory distinction. The two antibodies have been jockeying for leadership of the Alzheimer’s market, and Lilly is a step behind: Leqembi earned $168 million globally in the first quarter while Kisunla revenues trailed slightly at $124 million . A key difference between the two therapies is that Lilly’s drug is designed to be stopped once amyloid plaques are no longer visible on PET scans, while Leqembi is given indefinitely. Biogen and Eisai seem ready to turn this dosing discrepancy into a market advantage. Alisha Alaimo, Biogen’s head of North America, told investors during an earnings call in April that doctors have been considering switching patients to maintenance Leqembi once patients are taken off Kisunla. Alzheimer’s disease Biogen ready to catch Alzheimer’s patients transitioning off Lilly’s Kisunla Key dosing differences between Eli Lilly’s Kisunla and Biogen’s Leqembi are about to come to a head in the Alzheimer’s market as patients end their 18-month course of Lilly’s product. April 29, 2026 · 3 min read · Annalee Armstrong Read more “We do have physicians that are looking at: Can we switch them to maintenance or to substitute maintenance of Leqembi?” Alaimo said. Beyond Alzheimer’s disease, Lilly’s AlzeCure agreement continues the pharma’s recent deal-making spree. Just last week, the pharma giant brought on three partners: Ascidian Therapeutics for $1.9 billion , Haisco Pharmaceutical Group for more than $3 billion and Hanmi Pharm for $1.2 billion . The week before, Lilly swallowed a trio of vaccine developers for a total deal value of up to $3.8 billion .

iStock, Afry Harvy Over the past decade, Eli Lilly has bought out more biotechs than any of the other top 12 pharmas by revenue—with 10 of those acquisitions arriving just this year. No one has signed more M&A deals than Eli Lilly this year, with $25.27 billion spent across 10 transactions. That total represents more than half of the $46.38 billion that the top 12 pharmas by revenue have spent in 2026 so far and clearly launches the obesity juggernaut into a whole new stratosphere in the pharma world. In the past decade, Lilly has inked 30 buyouts. Second in line among the top 10 pharmas is Novartis with 26, with the list falling more steeply from there. Deals signed does not have any correlation to money spent, however. Lilly’s 10-year deal history amounts to $54 billion, while Bristol Myers Squibb’s 11 deals over the same time period total $146.7 billion. Of course, one of those deals was Celgene, which S&P Capital IQ valued at $99.5 billion, making it the largest pharma deal in the past decade. The wide range speaks to Lilly’s preference for smaller deals, which was on display last month when the company bought three vaccine biotechs on the same day for $3.8 billion combined. Up until Monday, Lilly had the largest deal of the year with the $8.14 billion acquisition of Centessa Pharmaceuticals from March. But GSK stole the crown by offering to buy Nuvalent for $10.6 billion. The largest transaction of the year so far falls slightly outside the typical pharma space in generics, with Sun Pharma buying women’s health focused Organon for $11.75 billion. Beyond M&A, Lilly has also inked 11 major licensing deals, including a double header on June 2 with South Korea’s Haisco and China’s Hanmi. While the partners in the former did not reveal the disease area, Lilly will work with Hanmi on a GLP-2 for short bowel disease.

China's biotech ascent calls for more regulation in Washington and several prominent ASCO presentations made our news this week. The drumbeat of news regarding Asian pharma—and particularly China—continues to grow louder. At the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, Akeso took center stage with an ivonescimab presentation, and Fierce’s Angus Liu took a chance to dive into the bigger picture and symbolism behind the event. Elsewhere, calls in Washington to crack down on China biotech transactions are getting louder. Plus more. 1. As Akeso takes center stage at ASCO, China biotech industry cements its coming of age With its ASCO plenary session this past weekend, Akeso made history for the China biopharma industry. Afterward, in a series of interviews, market watchers explained to Fierce how the country’s biopharma rise is now undeniable—and how it’s not likely to slow any time soon. 2. As China biotech crackdown calls reverberate in Washington, the pushback gets louder, too In Washington, D.C., two lawmakers have called for an expansion of the COINS Act to include biopharma transactions. The act, which recently went into law as part of the U.S. defense spending bill, creates new notification requirements for American companies investing in certain Chinese sectors. While it doesn’t include biotechnology yet, some lawmakers aim to change that. And within the industry, skeptics are speaking up. 3. Takeda touts ‘tremendous potential’ of Innovent’s PD-1/IL-2 bispecific after seeing survival data On the drug development front, ASCO provided an opportunity for partners Takeda and Innovent to share a glimpse of the potential benefits of their bispecific candidate, IBI363, in patients with advanced immunotherapy-resistant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Speaking with Fierce, Teresa Bitetti, president of Takeda's global oncology business unit, said the drug candidate holds “enormous promise.” Separately, Innovent on Thursday reported a phase 3 win for another Takeda-partnered drug, IBI343, in patients in China and Japan with locally advanced unresectable or metastatic CLDN18.2-positive gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma. 4. Legend scientific founder returns to ASCO with new ambition for high-yield, non-gene-editing CAR-T platform Even more intrigue swept ASCO with the revelation that Legend’s scientific founder, Frank Fan, M.D., Ph.D., was returning with a new company, Wondercel Therapeutics. The idea behind Wondercel and its approach is to create an off-the-shelf universal CAR-T platform to outmaneuver two prominent bottlenecks in the cell therapy industry: production scalability and the pitfalls associated with gene editing. Fan made his ASCO return after Legend Biotech stole the show at the conference 9 years ago with data on the drug that eventually became Carvykti. 5. Lilly pens $1.2B deal for Hanmi’s GLP-2 drug being aimed at short bowel syndrome Lately, no week can be complete without an Eli Lilly business development deal, and this week was no exception. On Monday, the Indianapolis drug giant linked up with Korea’s Hanmi Pharm in a $1.2 billion deal centered on a GLP-2 drug prospect. Hours later, the company unveiled a partnership with China’s Haisco centered on a handful of drug prospects. No details on targets were shared with the latter deal announcement. 6. Bristol Myers’ $800M bispecific ADC aces China breast cancer study, putting TROP2 drugs on notice After Bristol Myers Squibb forked over $800 million on a first-in-class bispecific antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), there are indications the bet is paying off. In a China-only study, the drug, an EGFRxHER3 ADC called izalontamab brengitecan (iza-bren), significantly reduced the risk of death by 40% compared with the physician’s choice of chemotherapy in patients with previously treated triple-negative breast cancer. The results could serve to create a budding rivalry between the candidate and existing TROP2 ADCs. Other News of Note: 7. UPDATED: After Takeda’s defeat, Dizal picks up baton to take on J&J in EGFR lung cancer subtype 8. Agios signs $165M deal for blood disorder drug from Korea’s Oscotec that flunked phase 2 study 9. Eisai whips up Alzheimer’s dietary guidance to expand nutrition program beyond cancer 10. Shionogi's COVID antiviral Xocova passes muster with FDA as post-exposure preventative