Ropes & Gray Advises on Three of the Top 10 Biopharmaceutical Licensing Deals in 2023

Ropes & Gray represented clients in three of the top 10 and four of the top 20 biopharmaceutical licensing deals measured by deal value, according to an analysis by DealForma. Ropes & Gray licensing partners advised clients in these top deals for an aggregate value of $14.7 billion. Among the deals Ropes & Gray was involved in were the following:

• Pfizer in a strategic collaboration with Flagship Pioneering to create a new pipeline of innovative medicines. Under the novel agreement, Flagship and Pfizer will each invest $50 million upfront to explore opportunities to develop 10 single-asset programs by leveraging Flagship’s ecosystem of more than 40 human health companies and multiple biotechnology platforms. Pfizer will fund and have an option to acquire each selected development program. Flagship and its bioplatform companies will be eligible to receive up to $700 million in milestones and royalties for each successful commercialized program. Emerging companies & venture capital partners Brad Flint and Rajarshi Banerjee and life sciences licensing partner Amanda Austin represented Pfizer in the second largest biopharma licensing deal of 2023 for $7 billion.
• Monte Rosa Therapeutics in a strategic collaboration with Roche to discover novel molecular glue degraders targeting cancer and neurological diseases previously considered impossible to drug. Life sciences licensing partner Marc Rubenstein represented Monte Rosa Therapeutics in the $3 billion deal.
• Novo Nordisk in a collaboration with Valo Health to discover and develop novel treatments for cardiometabolic diseases such as heart attack, stroke and diabetes using real-world patient data and artificial intelligence machine learning models to accelerate the process of discovering and developing new small molecule therapies. Life sciences licensing partners Hannah England and Marc Rubenstein led Novo Nordisk in the $2.7 billion deal.