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Corp Fin leadership has signaled that staff time may be better spent listening to earnings calls than reviewing routine shelf filings, and a recent comment letter exchange shows why. For life sciences companies, whose calls routinely cover program-level spend, clinical data, and cash runway, inconsistencies between the call and the filings are a potential source of staff comments.
In the first six months of 2026, acquirers announced 13 qualifying acquisitions of public biopharma targets worth $66.6 billion in upfront consideration. This survey examines that period and the surge within it: what is driving it, how the deals are structured, and what it means for the parties negotiating the next one. Focusing on the…
Contingent value rights have become a defining feature of biopharma M&A, appearing in under 10% of mid-cap public-target deals before 2019 but a quarter to a third of them in every year since 2023. They let a buyer pay less cash at signing while preserving upside for selling stockholders on a binary clinical, regulatory, or…
On August 3, 2026, the California Supreme Court held in Gilead Tenofovir Cases (Aug. 3, 2026, S283862) ___ Cal.5th ___ (slip opn.), that a drug manufacturer owes no duty of care to users of a non-defective drug when deciding whether and when to commercialize an allegedly safer alternative drug. The Court reached that conclusion on…
We just published Gibson Dunn’s 2026 Royalty Finance Market Update — a comprehensive analysis of 133 life sciences royalty transactions from 2020 through 2025, totaling $32.7 billion in aggregate value. A few findings stood out to us as genuinely worth flagging for practitioners in the space.
On February 18, 2026, FDA Commissioner Martin Makary and Vinay Prasad, then-Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, published a landmark policy announcement in the New England Journal of Medicine that a single adequate and well-controlled pivotal trial — supplemented by confirmatory evidence — is now the…