LONDON – Family-owned Angelini Pharma is to buy Swiss startup Arvelle Therapeutics GmbH for $960 million, acquiring full European rights to the epilepsy drug cenobamate. The first tranche, of $610 million, will be paid following the EMA’s recommendation to approve cenobamate, which is expected at either the January or February meeting of the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use.

DUBLIN – A re-evaluation of psychedelic drugs as potential therapies for major depressive disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other neuropsychiatric conditions has been underway for some time, but this broad effort gained further momentum during 2020, as commercial firms started to raise money at the level needed to enable the field to start moving from small-scale academic studies to the kind of industry-scale trials that will be needed to convince regulators, patients and physicians that these molecules could become viable treatment options.

Osmotica Pharmaceuticals plc’s amendment earlier this month to the NDA for arbaclofen in spasticity resulting from multiple sclerosis wasn’t enough to quell the concerns of the FDA, which smacked the firm with its second complete response letter (CRL).

Shares of Voyager Therapeutics Inc. and its partner, Neurocrine Biosciences Inc., fell in early trading Dec. 23 after Voyager announced an FDA clinical hold on the phase II Restore-1 trial of VY-AADC, an adeno-associated virus-based gene therapy Neurocrine is developing as NBIb-1817 for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. The trial had been paused since at least November as its data safety monitoring board reviewed MRI abnormalities in some study participants.

By acquiring privately held Cadent Therapeutics Inc., Novartis AG gains full rights to Cadent’s allosteric modulator program, part of which the two companies began collaborating on in 2015, and all the company’s outstanding stock. Cambridge, Mass.-based Cadent will receive as much as $770 million, $210 million of it up front, plus $560 million in milestones.

DUBLIN – Could a tyrosine kinase inhibitor approved for treating canine cancer offer clinical benefits in Alzheimer’s disease? That’s the bold claim AB Science SA is making, after unveiling top-line data from a phase IIb/III trial in which it reported that a subgroup of patients on a twice daily 4.5-mg/kg dose of oral masitinib experienced “a significant treatment effect” as compared with placebo after 24 weeks.

Prevail Therapeutics Inc. won't be prevailing on its own. Eli Lilly and Co. is acquiring the gene therapy company for $880 million up front plus an earn-out of up to $160 million if Lilly can gain regulatory approval for at least one of Prevail's drugs.

Wall Street is liking the prospects of Neurocrine Biosciences Inc.’s NBI-827104, in the rare pediatric indication called epileptic encephalopathy with continuous spikes and waves during sleep. San Diego-based Neurocrine is moving the orally active, brain-penetrating T-type calcium channel blocker, licensed from Idorsia Ltd., of Allschwil, Switzerland, into phase II trials.