LON­DON – Jef­feries Health­care Con­fer­ence may have found its groove.

While last year’s long queues may be gone, the buzz is still pal­pa­ble as thou­sands ar­rive in Lon­don to what ob­servers de­scribe as a key con­fab to plant seeds that could ma­ture in­to deals in the com­ing months. This year, the con­fer­ence ran for four days in­stead of three.

There are more venues to meet out­side the Wal­dorf Hilton, such as a near­by pub with large Jef­feries sig­nage draped by the en­trance. There are free um­brel­las on hand (es­sen­tial when rush­ing be­tween build­ings dur­ing un­pre­dictable weath­er) and gin­ger and ap­ple shots by the door (as tem­per­a­tures hit sin­gle dig­its this week — that’s Cel­sius, not Fahren­heit).

For years, every time there was a con­tro­ver­sial de­ci­sion in bio­phar­ma, an in­ter­est­ing dis­cov­ery in chem­istry, or an over­sup­ply of en­thu­si­asm for an idea or tech­nol­o­gy, Derek Lowe of­ten has had some­thing to say.

From his blog at Sci­ence, he has writ­ten hun­dreds of posts on what the drug in­dus­try is think­ing and talk­ing about. And to­day he’s go­ing to be join­ing us on Post-Hoc Live to chat about his writ­ing ca­reer, some of his re­cent posts on Sarep­ta, and his thoughts on a few big ideas in chem­istry.

Derek will join us at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube. You can save a cal­en­dar re­minder here.

Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing and its sprawl­ing ap­pa­ra­tus of biotech star­tups struck a se­ries of deals this week with GSK, Mer­ck KGaA and a large med­ical re­search in­sti­tute in Sau­di Ara­bia.

The Boston-area in­vestor and in­cu­ba­tor, which raised more than $3.5 bil­lion last year, is look­ing to repli­cate the suc­cess it saw with Mod­er­na. It has more than 40 star­tups un­der its wings, and phar­ma part­ner­ships have be­come a "big­ger and big­ger deal" for many of them, CEO Noubar Afeyan told End­points News last year.

On Thurs­day, Flag­ship an­nounced that GSK will work with Pro­Found Ther­a­peu­tics to hunt for new pro­teins that could be key ge­net­ic sources of chron­ic ob­struc­tive pul­monary dis­ease. They'll al­so see whether there are sim­i­lar pro­tein tar­gets they could tap in­to for id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis. GSK al­ready mar­kets COPD med­i­cines and has mul­ti­ple oth­ers in clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment.

The FDA has OK'd Re­gen­eron’s Eylea HD in­jec­tion for an­oth­er in­di­ca­tion and as a month­ly dos­ing op­tion, de­spite is­sues at its third-par­ty man­u­fac­tur­ing site run by No­