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#250 | Baxter joins the spinoff bandwagon

Hello, and welcome back to a brand new week with The Kable. There's an old adage that talks about things remaining the same the more they change. Certainly seems to hold true for the news cycle. A couple of years ago, everybody was talking about moving on from Covid. Everybody is still talking about it. Also, in 2021, all conversations about trade eventually became discussions about the supply chain and how backlogged it was. Partly due to Covid. And partly also because a ship blocked the Suez Canal for a few days. For a while, it looked like this year, too, would present us with the opportunity to talk about the supply chain because a ship ran aground in the Suez Canal once again. Unlike 2021 though, this time, the (smaller) ship was refloated without much delay.

In the UK, BioNTech is partnering with the government for research in cancer vaccines. One of the goals of the partnerships is to provide personalised mRNA-based immunotherapies to 10,000 cancer patients by 2030.

In the US (and around the world), sports is big business and growing. So is sports medicine. Taking advantage of this increasing opportunity is Zimmer Biomet which is expanding its sports medicine portfolio with a $275 million acquisition of tendon implant maker Embody.

Last year was the year of spin-offs, with Novartis, GSK, GE and BD being among the largest names to spin off divisions into their stand-alone units. This year, the trend looks to continue, with Baxter shedding its renal care and acute therapies units into an independent company which it hopes will stand alone in the next 12 to 18 months.

And finally, the US Department of Defence issued a lot of contracts in 2022 to counter all manner of threats, including radiation, biowarfare and chemical attacks. In the same vein, a $379 million contract has been awarded to Emergent BioSolutions to supply a skin decontamination lotion used in case of chemical attacks.