The typ­i­cal CEO of a pub­lic bio­phar­ma com­pa­ny made $4.73 mil­lion in 2024, a 40% jump from last year’s me­di­an fig­ure.

But a hand­ful of CEOs hauled in much larg­er pay­days. End­points News com­piled da­ta on pay pack­ages for 475 CEOs at life sci­ences com­pa­nies as part of our an­nu­al pay analy­sis. These com­pa­nies range from multi­na­tion­al drug gi­ants to tiny pre­clin­i­cal star­tups. Though me­di­an pay came in at $4.73 mil­lion, the av­er­age pay for CEOs was $6.56 mil­lion — dri­ven high­er by those few ex­tra large pay pack­ages.

At the high end, 20 CEOs brought in com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages worth over $20 mil­lion. Most of that pay is from stock op­tions or shares that vest over time or re­quire com­pa­nies to hit cer­tain mile­stones.

It’s not an easy time to raise mon­ey for vac­cine de­vel­op­ment, es­pe­cial­ly shots that re­ly on mR­NA tech­nol­o­gy. But against all odds, one start­up has cinched $45 mil­lion to be­gin test­ing an ex­per­i­men­tal uni­ver­sal flu vac­cine next year, End­points News has learned.

The com­pa­ny, called Cen­ti­vax, de­signed a vac­cine that con­tains a whop­ping 22 dif­fer­ent mR­NA mol­e­cules en­cod­ing pro­teins from flu strains span­ning the past cen­tu­ry. The South San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny claims an­i­mal stud­ies show that the im­mune sys­tem can spot the com­mon­al­i­ties be­tween the strains and fo­cus its at­tack on the tid­bits of the virus that are un­like­ly to change from sea­son to sea­son.

Kid­ney dis­ease drug de­vel­op­er ProKid­ney vault­ed above $1 per share this morn­ing, de­spite mixed open-la­bel Phase 2 da­ta.

The com­pa­ny is study­ing whether its lead pro­gram, a cell ther­a­py called ril­paren­cel, can treat pa­tients with chron­ic kid­ney dis­ease, di­a­betes and low kid­ney func­tion as mea­sured by eGFR lev­els. The Phase 2 tri­al is be­ing used to sup­port the piv­otal Phase 3 pro­gram, where one study is planned and the oth­er was dis­con­tin­ued last year.

In the Phase 2, ril­paren­cel sta­bi­lized kid­ney func­tion in 24 pa­tients who re­ceived two in­jec­tions by a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin. These pa­tients’ “eGFR slope” de­clined by 78% af­ter one year. But a sec­ond group of 25 pa­tients who on­ly re­ceived one dose did not achieve a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fit (p=0.085), and their eGFR slope de­clined by 50%.

Quan­ter­ix has com­plet­ed its ac­qui­si­tion of Akoya Bio­sciences, fol­low­ing in­ter­est from a third-par­ty bid­der who threat­ened to tor­pe­do the deal that has a to­tal en­ter­prise val­ue of $127 mil­lion.

The trans­ac­tion was first an­nounced in Jan­u­ary. But in May, Akoya an­nounced that it was con­sid­er­ing an un­so­licit­ed, all-cash buy­out of­fer it re­ceived from an undis­closed third par­ty.

Akoya did not re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment on why Quan­ter­ix was pre­ferred.

The trans­ac­tion is cre­at­ing what the com­pa­nies call a ful­ly in­te­grat­ed plat­form for de­tect­ing pro­tein bio­mark­ers in both tis­sue and blood. That ca­pa­bil­i­ty, Quan­ter­ix CEO Ma­soud Toloue said in an in­ter­view, seeks to change how dis­eases like can­cer and Alzheimer’s are di­ag­nosed, mon­i­tored and treat­ed.