What Happens to Royalties When a Drug Gets a Label Expansion Understanding the contractual mechanics, valuation dynamics, and investor risk when a drug's approved indications grow after the deal is signed.
The Weekly Term Sheet (2026-W12) The week of March 15-21, 2026, marked a notable tempo change in the global life sciences deal landscape. After a blistering W11 that saw over $3.8 billion in new capital raised across biotech equity and convertible offerings, the opening days of W12 were dominated not by headline-grabbing M&
Skinny Label Infringement: When Carve-Outs Fail and Royalty Streams Bleed The "skinny label" is a regulatory permission slip to seek approval for fewer than all conditions of use of a reference product. In theory, it enables clean market segmentation: a generic enters for off-patent indications while the innovator's second medical use patent remains commercially intact. In
Company of the week: Asahi Kasei Company Overview and Corporate Structure Asahi Kasei Corporation (TSE: 3407, OTC: AHKSY) is a Japanese multinational conglomerate founded in May 1931 in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, originally as a producer of ammonia and cellulose fiber. Today it operates across three core segments: Material, Homes, and Healthcare. With approximately 50,000 employees worldwide
Fund of the week: HealthCap IX Overview and Investment Focus HealthCap is not a generalist European venture capital firm — it is one of the oldest, most consistent life sciences specialists on the continent. Founded in Stockholm in 1996 by Björn Odlander and Peder Fredrikson, the firm has raised nine successive funds, financed more than 130 companies,
Step-up Provisions in Pharmaceutical Royalty Financings When Savara sold a royalty on MOLBREEVI to RTW funds in late 2025, the deal included a clause that most observers would have overlooked: if prior-year net sales fell short of a specified threshold, the investor's royalty would jump from 7.0% to 9.5% for the following
The Overriding Royalty Interest in Pharmaceutical Royalty Financing The overriding royalty interest has been a standard instrument in oil and gas financing for over a century. It has funded drilling programmes, compensated geologists, settled disputes, and structured billions of dollars in production payment transactions across North American mineral properties. It has also generated a substantial body of case
Royalties on Antibody-Drug Conjugates: The Linker-Payload Patent Problem and Who Owns the Royalty When Three Parties Each Contributed a Component The antibody-drug conjugate has a structural feature that makes it uniquely problematic from an intellectual property standpoint: it is, by design, a composite of three distinct technologies developed by three communities of scientists who largely did not know each other. The antibody came from one tradition, the cytotoxic payload from
The Weekly Term Sheet (2026-W11) The second week of March 2026 represented a defining period for the global life sciences sector, as the industry transitioned from the volatility of previous fiscal cycles into a phase of disciplined but aggressive capital deployment. Between March 9 and March 13, 2026, the deal landscape was characterized by a
Cure-Backed Securities: The Investor Return Problem Gene Therapy Finance Hasn't Solved A new paper published in Gene Therapy this week proposes securitizing 30-year performance-based annuities to solve the upfront payment problem for cell and gene therapies. The mechanics are elegant, the Monte Carlo results are encouraging, and the analogy to mortgage-backed securities is deliberately chosen. But read from the perspective of