Following upon its announcement in May that it would pay $1.86 billion for Diagnostics Products, to bring an immunodiagnostics business in-house, Siemens announced in June that it will acquire Bayer Diagnostics for approximately €4.2 billion or $5.26 billion. Siemens thus catapults itself to the number two spot in the immunodiagnostics segment of IVD, after Roche, and by its calculations, now plays a close third to Abbott Laboratories in the overall in vitro diagnostics market.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals deal with Johnson & Johnson for its Phase II hepatitis C protease inhibitor VX-950 underscore the significant potential for HCV protease inhibitors to alter the landscape of disease treatment and suggests pharmaceutical dealmakers will have to be ever more flexible to land biotech's best products.

Astellas Pharma badly wanted to expand its rights to FibroGen's oral anemia compounds beyond Japan. So badly, in fact, that it paid a whopping $300 million up front, agreed to up to $465 million in pre-approval milestones, and will fund half of the compounds' development in Europe and North America. Yet Astellas doesn't even get North American commercial rights in exchange: it had to settle for European and other ex-US territories.