Episode 173 - February 20, 2026

You're listening to the biotech hangout, a live and unedited weekly discussion of all the latest news on our industry with a a group of biotech leaders and experts. I'm Eric Schmidt, and my cohost today are Sam Pizzelli, Paul Matisse, Craig Shneva, and, Luba Greenwood. For more information about our hosts and guest speakers or to listen to the most recent episode, you can go to the biotechhangout.com. Well, thanks everyone for for joining today. It is a short ish week, but but a busy week. And I think, because we didn't have biotech hangout last week, we're gonna dip back into the bag a little bit and and pull out some topics, from the prior week to discuss as well. So we've got a pretty busy agenda lined up. We're gonna start, with some discussion of the markets, deal flow, fundraising, and biotech, and and maybe a discussion of the index itself, the XBI, and and kind of where it's where it's heading, what might be needed to, to get to better performance. We'll we've got a lot to talk about with regard to the FDA, a ton of updates, some good, some bad, some indifferent. So we'll spend a fair bit of time, going through all the machinations of the agency, and then, we'll conclude with some company specific updates. And there wasn't as much data this week as in prior weeks, but we've got some clinical datasets to to cover as well. So that's the agenda for today. Let's start with a little bit of a market look. And and, Luba, I think you were gonna walk us through some of the more interesting licensing and, and fundraising deals that occurred this week. Yeah. Thanks so much. And the focus this week, and, you may have seen quite a lot of articles written on this, is on China. So we saw a number of reports this week showing a major uptick in China for out licensing deals already this year. We're still only, in mid February right now. Because of patent clips and r and d cut costs, that is has been the, driver, of pharma companies to scout in China. China out licensing has hit a record, last year of being about a 137,700,000,000.0, with major pharma such as Novartis, Merck, and GSK doing some of the biggest deals in China last year. And the total number of deals was 186. We already just in this year, have, seen 38 out licensing deals in out of China. We have seen already deal size that has jumped by 76%. Upfront fees have doubled. So if you're going to China thinking you're gonna get a deal, that's not like not likely. You're gonna get some innovative assets, but they're gonna be expensive. Deals just this year in 2026 have reached 1,300,000,000.0. Just this month, we've seen AstraZeneca do a deal for weight loss, which was, valued at about 18,500,000,000.0. AbbVie has just done a deal, licensing deal …