Editor’s Take: Facility acquisitions and strategic partnerships were also part of this very busy first week of August.

This week on “The Friday Brief”: Mergers, launches, and rebrands. Curium is absorbing Lantheus in a deal potentially worth up to $8 billion. Supernus and Indivior are merging, creating a diversified central nervous system biopharma company. Obsidian this week completed the transaction merging Galera Therapeutics under its umbrella.

Launching this week in the San Diego area, the cell therapy science and development services company NueCell Bio. Another launch is actually somewhat more of a rebrand. Cerenome has launched; this company was previously known as Plus Therapeutics. They also plan to be in the CNS business, with a further focus on oncology. And on the facility side, Codis has completed its acquisition of a former Catalent site in the UK.

Industry partnerships continue to focus on AI. Bristol Myers Squibb is deploying Schrödinger’s AI co-scientist, Bunsen, in its research organization. Evotec and Odyssey Therapeutics now have an AI-enabled R&D collaboration in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

In other partnerships, Lilly and Amplia Therapeutics are combining respective investigational treatments to try to target non-small cell lung cancer. Alteogen has a new licensing agreement with an as-yet unidentified global pharma company to develop and commercialize a subcutaneous biologic. And CellFiber and Tidewave Bio are linking up to evaluate scalable 3D manufacturing for next-gen solid tumor immunotherapy.

That’s it for this week—we are taking a short break next week, so see you next on Aug. 21. Until then, remember the latest breaking news is at contractpharma.com, and sign up for our newsletters for even more coverage.

We’ll see you in two weeks, on The Friday Brief.