Forest pays $75 million up front for U.S. rights to Almirall's once-daily long-acting beta agonist in combination with a corticosteroid.

For all its noise and parties, speeches, and meetings, the 26th annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference felt more like an indecisive pause than the industry's first step into the new year. Biotech investors see their best exits through M&A, but activity's been unpredictable and less buoyant than expected. But generics and still-impoverished pipelines will force drug companies to make different choices. The quickest solution to pipeline problems is to imitate biotechs by developing or buying biotech products and technologies. These technologies allow Big Pharma to do with biologics what they used to do with small molecules: create fast-followers. Except that there's far more competition this time around.

In early January, Genzyme nabbed one of the highest-value specialist cholesterol-busting drugs around: Phase III mipomersen, from Isis Pharmaceuticals. But given the ENHANCE-triggered questions around the value of ever-lower LDL, it's reasonable to ask whether mipomersen has a somewhat less rosy prospect in the few weeks since the deal was signed.