It has taken a minute, but the $10.8 billion spent in 2023 — for Prometheus — is proving… wise.

Here is the latest, from FierceBio — explaining how Rahway made a largely-smart M&A move in 2023, plunking down $10.8 billion in cash, for bio-candidate developer Prometheus. [Crohns disease is another target of the former Prometheus stable of bio-tech candidates.]

…Merck has touted a win for its anti-TL1A antibody in a phase 2b trial in patients with moderate to severe hidradenitis suppurativa (HS).

The study met its primary and secondary endpoints at week 16, informing phase 3 development for tulisokibart in HS, according to the company. The win was first announced in August during its second-quarter earnings update.

“We are excited to expand the clinical data for tulisokibart beyond inflammatory bowel disease with these positive phase 2b results,” Aileen Pangan, M.D., vice president and therapeutic area head, immunology clinical research, Merck Research Laboratories, said in the release. “We look forward to advancing tulisokibart to phase 3 for patients living with HS….”

Merck inherited tulisokibart in the $10.8 billion acquisition of Prometheus Biosciences in 2023. Since then, tulisokibart has been hit-or-miss. In June, Merck reported a phase 3 victory for tulisokibart in ulcerative colitis, followed by a phase 2 fail in systemic sclerosis associated with interstitial lung disease in August….

Now you know. And we are struck by the irony, of all these wondrous life-saving advances — while overnight, Tennessee utterly fails to kill a woman adjudged very near the border for being ineligible for the death penalty due to mental infirmities.

And so, Tennessee’s taxpayers must now likely fund a woman in a permanently vegatative state, all in a very high cost hospital ICU. This obsession with retributive death — badly twice-botched, as well — is simply… beneath our supposedly-shared dignity, in a civilized society. But perhaps — just maybe — we aren’t so civilized, afterall.

[Q.: are we really that much different — than the failed Pazzi assassins hired by Pope Sixtus IV, in 1478 — or the gladiators, killing and being killed in the Colosseo, in ~220 BC? I dunno, this morning.]

Out.

नमस्ते