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Merck Bets $1 Billion That Google Can Make Drug Discovery Suck Less
Merck just committed up to $1 billion over a decade to deploy Google's agentic AI across its entire 75,000-person organization. This isn't a pilot program; it's the largest operational AI rollout in pharma history. The goal: compress drug development timelines that currently stretch 10 to 15 years and cost billions per approved drug. Google Cloud engineers will embed directly alongside Merck teams across R&D, manufacturing, sales, and corporate ops. The deal lands amid a full-blown pharma AI arms race, with Eli Lilly committing $2.75 billion to Insilico Medicine just months earlier.
Why it matters: Drug development has been getting slower and more expensive for decades (a grim trend researchers call Eroom's Law). This deal, alongside similar billion-dollar commitments from Lilly and others, signals that big pharma is no longer dabbling with AI. It's going all in, and the results will shape medicine for the next decade.
Read more →Deals and M&A
Gilead Folds a Billion-Dollar Hand in Oncology
After investing billions across a ten-year alliance, Gilead is quietly unwinding its oncology partnership with Arcus Biosciences. Two major lung cancer trials were scrapped in April when a futility analysis showed their TIGIT combo couldn't beat Merck's Keytruda. But Gilead isn't retreating from cancer: it just closed a $7.8 billion Arcellx acquisition and bought Tubulis for $3.15 billion upfront (plus up to $1.85 billion in milestone payments), pivoting hard toward cell therapy and antibody-drug conjugates.
Read more →Esperion Ditches Nasdaq After a 97% Stock Collapse
PE firm ARCHIMED is taking Esperion private at $3.16 per share (a 58% premium), valuing the company at up to $1.1 billion. The twist: Esperion's cholesterol drugs are posting strong revenue growth, but a decade-long stock collapse from $100 to under $3 made public life untenable. Shareholders also get contingent payouts tied to sales milestones extending through 2030, part of a growing trend of small biotechs fleeing public markets for patient private capital.
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