Welcome to the first edition of weekly biotech snapshot. Every Tuesday, we'll cover the deals, trials, and funding rounds shaping the industry. Faster format. Same lens. Let's get into it.
The biotech market didn't take a holiday break. While most of us were offline, billions of dollars moved. The pattern was clear: capital is flowing toward infrastructure, not science projects.
Two of the largest deals of the quarter weren't bets on novel biology. They were acquisitions of commercial machines. Sales forces, manufacturing capacity, recurring revenue. The biggest AI drug discovery company went public. And one clinical failure wiped out 90% of a company's value in a single day.
The theme for 2026 is taking shape. The market is paying for certainty.
Here's what happened.
BioMarin is buying Amicus Therapeutics for $14.50 per share. The deal creates a rare disease powerhouse.
On the surface, this looks like a standard acquisition. BioMarin gets Galafold (an oral Fabry disease treatment) and Pombiliti + Opfolda (a Pompe disease therapy). But the real value isn't the drugs. It's the infrastructure.
Amicus has a commercial team that calls on the same doctors BioMarin already serves. The overlap is nearly perfect. BioMarin can plug Amicus's products into its existing sales force and patient access network without building anything new. That's rare in biotech M&A.
BioMarin stock on announcement
+15%
Acquirers almost always drop
The financing matters too. BioMarin is funding this with $3.7 billion in debt, not equity. That signals confidence in the cash flows. The deal is expected to add to earnings within 12 months. The market is saying commercial infrastructure is worth paying for.
Sanofi is buying Dynavax for $15.50 per share, a 39% premium. The headline asset is Heplisav-B, a hepatitis B vaccine. But that's not why Sanofi is paying $2.2 billion.
The real prize is CpG 1018, Dynavax's proprietary adjuvant technology. Adjuvants are ingredients that make vaccines work better. CpG 1018 triggers a stronger immune response than traditional adjuvants. That's why Heplisav-B only requires two doses instead of three.
Sanofi is one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world. By acquiring CpG 1018, they get a platform they can apply across their entire pipeline. The deal includes a Phase 1/2 shingles vaccine candidate that could compete with GSK's Shingrix. This is platform M&A.
Sanofi isn't buying a vaccine. They're buying an engine that makes every future vaccine better.
Insilico Medicine listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30, raising roughly $293 million. It's the largest biotech IPO in Hong Kong this year. And the first major public market test for AI drug discovery.
Insilico's platform covers the full drug discovery process. Their AI identifies targets, designs molecules, and predicts clinical trial outcomes. They've advanced 23 drug candidates, with two in Phase 2 trials.
The cornerstone investors tell the story. Eli Lilly invested. So did Tencent, Temasek, and Schroders. When big pharma backs an AI platform with their own capital, that's a signal.
Why Hong Kong instead of NASDAQ? Insilico has significant operations in China. A US listing would have exposed them to Biosecure Act concerns. Hong Kong gives them access to global capital while staying connected to China's research ecosystem.
The use of proceeds is telling: expand their automated "Life Star" labs. As AI models become commoditized, the competitive advantage shifts to proprietary data. Insilico is building the wet lab infrastructure to generate that data.
The moat isn't the algorithm. It's the lab.
Solve Therapeutics closed a $120 million financing round to advance its antibody-drug conjugate platform.
ADCs are one of the hottest areas in oncology. They combine an antibody (which finds the cancer cell) with a toxic payload (which kills it). The problem is the linker, the chemical bond holding them together. Traditional linkers are unstable. The payload falls off before reaching the tumor.
Solve's "CloakLink" technology fixes this. It masks the payload's chemical properties, allowing for more stable conjugates and higher drug-to-antibody ratios. More killing power, fewer side effects.
The infrastructure play: Solve isn't building cancer drugs. They're building the delivery system everyone else will use. In a crowded ADC market, the linker becomes the moat.
Not everything worked.
On December 29, Ultragenyx and Mereo BioPharma announced that setrusumab failed its Phase 3 trial in osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease).
Mereo BioPharma | December 29, 2025
-90%
Single session
The drug did what it was supposed to do. Bone mineral density increased. But fracture rates didn't decrease. The biology didn't translate.
This is the biomarker trap. In osteoporosis, higher bone density means fewer fractures. In osteogenesis imperfecta, the underlying collagen is defective. Building more bone doesn't help if the bone is still fragile.
Surrogate endpoints aren't clinical outcomes. The FDA will likely harden its stance on this. For investors, the lesson is clear: unproven biology gets punished. Infrastructure gets rewarded.
A few years ago, these deals would have been called boring. Now they're called smart. The market isn't paying for potential anymore. It's paying for infrastructure that generates cash today.
— Chris
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