Company of the week: Anaptys
A listed royalty company whose lead royalty is pledged in full, whose second royalty pays its milestones to somebody else, and whose licensee it is suing for the drug back.
More issues
The bridge and the take-out: short paper against the pharmaceutical royalty
Bridge financing is the shortest paper in the capital structure, and it is regularly written against some of the longest assets in it. The take-out provision is the machinery that governs how, when, and at whose cost the short paper is replaced. This is an account of both, worked
The rate underneath the royalty: duration, alpha, and the arbitrage that is really a liability trade
A royalty book carries a modified duration near five years, a discount rate in which the risk-free is now more than a third of the total, and a preferred return hurdle struck when the five-year point was under 1%. The asset has not changed. What an allocator gives
Pre-merger financing: funding the interval between signing and closing
A pharmaceutical merger agreement fixes the price on the signing date and delivers it on the closing date. Between the two sit the tender offer clock, the shareholder vote, and the merger control timetable, and the interval runs from weeks to more than a year.
Two financing problems live in
The Weekly Term Sheet (2026-W33)
Two aggregators printed on consecutive days, in opposite structures. Royalty Pharma bought Zealand's remaining rusfertide economics outright for $100M, half on closing and half a year later, leaving the seller 0.25% of net sales above $1.5B. HealthCare Royalty took OPKO's mazdutide royalty as security
Who buys a royalty, and where each one plays
A royalty is only worth what someone will pay for it, and not everyone who writes those cheques is buying the same thing.
The phrase "royalty fund" hides at least five different businesses. One buys finished, marketed royalties and clips the coupon. One funds the last year of
Fund of the week: Binney Street Capital (Dana-Farber)
Binney Street Capital is the venture fund of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Boston academic cancer centre.
Established in September 2020 and publicly launched in January 2021 as the Institute's first venture fund, it invests in companies built on Dana-Farber intellectual property or co-founded by Dana-
Company of the week: Relation Therapeutics
Relation sits at the top of the royalty stack, not the bottom. It holds no approved drug and almost no clinical risk, yet it is quietly assembling a royalty book on medicines that do not exist, across three different deal structures.
Created, Not Bought: The Shape of a Vaccine Royalty Trade
An earlier piece on this site, The Landscape of Vaccine Royalties and Royalty Financing, mapped how vaccine royalty streams arise, how they differ from therapeutic royalties, which deals have printed, and how the messenger RNA patent wars redistributed the economics of the pandemic products. It ended on an observation it
Nobody Holds It Long Enough: What Animal Health Royalties Need to Become an Asset Class
A royalty market can fail in three ways. There can be no cash flow, in which case there is nothing to discuss. There can be cash flow and no price, which is the biosimilar case: a stream exists, both sides can see it, and no number satisfies buyer and seller