In­sil­i­co Med­i­cine, part of the first wave of AI-dri­ven drug dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment shops, se­cured a $110 mil­lion megaround at a uni­corn val­u­a­tion for its pipeline of 30 treat­ment can­di­dates.

The clin­i­cal-stage start­up raised more than $400 mil­lion in its first decade and tried twice to go pub­lic via the Hong Kong Stock Ex­change. It let its most re­cent plans lapse in Sep­tem­ber. Val­ue Part­ners Group led the Se­ries E, which was dis­closed Wednes­day and comes three years af­ter a $60 mil­lion Se­ries D.

At the time of its HKEX fil­ing last year, CEO Alex Zha­voronkov was the largest share­hold­er in In­sil­i­co, own­ing 10.32% of shares. Oth­er large own­ers in­clude Palace In­vest­ments, Qim­ing Ven­ture Part­ners, War­burg Pin­cus and Aram­co Ven­tures. The Cam­bridge, MA-based start­up has lo­ca­tions across the globe, in­clud­ing in New York, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and Shang­hai.

Zealand Phar­ma has fi­nal­ly found a part­ner. And ac­cord­ing to the Dan­ish com­pa­ny, the li­cens­ing deal it an­nounced with Roche on Wednes­day for its amylin ana­log pe­tre­lin­tide is the biggest ever for an obe­si­ty can­di­date to date.

The com­pa­nies said the Swiss phar­ma is pay­ing Zealand $1.65 bil­lion up­front in cash. $1.4 bil­lion of that will be giv­en once the deal is closed, which is ex­pect­ed to be in the sec­ond quar­ter of this year, and $250 mil­lion over the next two years every time the part­ner­ship cel­e­brates an an­niver­sary.

Im­por­tant­ly, Roche and Zealand will al­so in­ves­ti­gate pe­tre­lin­tide com­bi­na­tions. The first on the list for co-ad­min­is­tra­tion is Roche’s GLP-1/GIP ag­o­nist can­di­date CT-388, which Roche ob­tained from its ac­qui­si­tion of Car­mot Ther­a­peu­tics in late 2023.

Here are some of the most com­pelling HIV up­dates from the an­nu­al Con­fer­ence on Retro­virus­es and Op­por­tunis­tic In­fec­tions in San Fran­cis­co:

Mer­ck said Wednes­day that a two-drug reg­i­men con­sist­ing of do­ravirine, sold un­der the name Pifel­tro, plus is­la­travir matched ap­proved an­ti­retro­vi­ral reg­i­mens in two Phase 3 stud­ies for cer­tain peo­ple with HIV. The drug­mak­er now plans to be­gin sub­mit­ting ap­pli­ca­tions for ap­proval to reg­u­la­tors in mid-2025.

In two stud­ies, Mer­ck com­pared adults with vi­ro­log­i­cal­ly sup­pressed HIV who switched from Gilead’s Bik­tarvy or stan­dard an­ti­retro­vi­ral ther­a­py (ART) to Mer­ck’s reg­i­men with those who stayed on their cur­rent ther­a­py. At week 48, the blind­ed study found that 1.5% of par­tic­i­pants who switched to Mer­ck’s reg­i­men had a vi­ral load of ≥50 copies/mL — the bar for de­tectable HIV vi­ral load. Mean­while, 0.6% of those who stayed on Bik­tarvy had a de­tectable vi­ral load.