The Gene Therapy Spree Rolls on With $3 Billion Astellas Deal

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Good afternoon, readers.

Biogen paid $800 million for Nightstar Therapeutics. Drug giant Roche wants to pony up $4.3 billion deal for Spark Therapeutics in a deal that’s now been extended more than a half dozen times.

And now, Japanese pharma giant Astellas Pharma wants to pay $3 billion to buy the biotech Audentes Therapeutics.

What do all of these proposed M&As have in common? They represent traditional drug giants making bets on the red-hot experimental gene therapy field.

Legacy biopharma companies have been pursuing these gene therapy bolt-on acquisitions at a rapid clip—especially after several major Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals for pioneering (though, in some cases, controversially expensive treatments) that hold the promise of curing certain conditions after just one course of treatment.

But the question is whether this is just the drug industry’s latest bubble—or if this particular movement has staying power.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

INDICATIONS

President Trump's FDA nominee seems bound for confirmation—but faces vaping criticisms. The Senate HELP committee advanced Trump's FDA chief nominee on an 18-5 vote, likely heralding a final confirmation later this year. But Dr. Stephen Hahn of the MD Anderson Cancer Center faced some tough questions over his dedication to cracking down on the vaping and e-cigarette industry during his confirmation process. More on that here. (Fortune)

THE BIG PICTURE

CDC: 1 in 5 teens are pre-diabetic. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is out with a new report finding that 20% of U.S. adolescents are now pre-diabetic (as well as 25% of young adults). "Until recently, young children and teens almost never got type 2 diabetes, which is why it used to be called adult-onset diabetes," said the agency and its affiliated authors in a study. "Now, about one-third of American youth are overweight, a problem closely related to the increase in kids with type 2 diabetes, some as young as 10 years old." (CNN)