OR­LAN­DO, Fla. — In Oc­to­ber, Terns Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals made an an­nounce­ment that seemed to run counter to every pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment in biotech: It got out of obe­si­ty to fo­cus on can­cer.

The 9.4% stock drop that day showed in­vestors' dis­ap­point­ment. But in the months since, the com­pa­ny's de­ci­sion has been more than proven to be the right one. Soon af­ter drop­ping the obe­si­ty pro­gram, it re­leased da­ta for its rare leukemia treat­ment that has more than tripled the com­pa­ny's val­ue. And it be­lieves it may be able to com­pete with an emerg­ing No­var­tis block­buster.

On Mon­day, Terns an­nounced up­dat­ed da­ta from the leukemia pro­gram, called TERN-701, show­ing that 64% of pa­tients in its tri­al hit a bench­mark known as ma­jor mol­e­c­u­lar re­sponse af­ter ear­li­er drugs stopped work­ing. The da­ta were an up­date from the re­lease in No­vem­ber, and from the Amer­i­can So­ci­ety of Hema­tol­ogy’s an­nu­al meet­ing, that helped dri­ve up the stock.

New CAR-T treat­ments for can­cer will need to prove that they're bet­ter than ex­ist­ing ther­a­pies to win FDA ap­proval, the agen­cy's bi­o­log­ics chief Vinay Prasad said in a jour­nal ar­ti­cle Mon­day, rais­ing the bar on the da­ta that will be re­quired for the prod­ucts.

Prasad co-au­thored the ar­ti­cle in JA­MA with oth­er top FDA of­fi­cials in the Cen­ter for Bi­o­log­ics Eval­u­a­tion and Re­search. De­vel­op­ers of new CAR-T treat­ments will need to take in­to ac­count ex­ist­ing CAR-T ther­a­pies when de­vel­op­ing a con­trol group for tri­als, and gen­er­ate ev­i­dence show­ing "su­pe­ri­or­i­ty of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al CAR T-cell ther­a­py com­pared with con­trol."

There are sev­en CAR-T prod­ucts ap­proved for can­cer on the mar­ket, all of which reached pa­tients based on sin­gle-arm tri­als with­out a con­trol group. Oth­ers are run­ning sin­gle-arm tri­als for CAR-Ts in rare or late-line can­cers to win full ap­provals.

Cidara Ther­a­peu­tics com­mand­ed a high­ly com­pet­i­tive bid­ding war for its in­fluen­za an­tivi­ral, at­tract­ing ac­qui­si­tion pro­pos­als from four phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, ac­cord­ing to a Fri­day evening reg­u­la­to­ry fil­ing.

Mer­ck of­fered near­ly 20% more per share than the next-high­est bid­der, at $221.50 per share, in a $9.2 bil­lion deal, ul­ti­mate­ly seal­ing the deal last month with the New Jer­sey drug gi­ant.

That made it the sixth-largest biotech buy­out of the year, be­hind oth­ers such as Mer­ck’s first ma­jor deal of the year, the $10 bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of res­pi­ra­to­ry drug­mak­er Verona Phar­ma.

Un­like the deal for Verona, Mer­ck had com­pe­ti­tion for Cidara. But Mer­ck was will­ing to play ball, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it search­es for ways to fill bil­lions of dol­lars in ex­pect­ed rev­enue loss from Keytru­da’s patent cliff lat­er this decade.