The average BioMeter value in the second quarter of 2014 jumped significantly to $143.4 million, an increase from the $15.9 million value in the first quarter. This included two blockbuster deals, the $1 billion up front paid by Merck to Bayer for rights to the family of soluble guanylate cyclase modulators, including the approved pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, Adempas, and the $710 million up-front payment from Celgene to Nogra for the Phase 2 Crohn’s disease drug GED-0301. Without these two transactions, the BioMeter value in the second quarter would have still been a healthy $41.7 million.

While the Bayer/Merck and Celgene/Nogra transactions are headline-worthy, the real story for the quarter was a continued strong increase in BioMeter value for pre-clinical discovery platforms. We have commented before that the BioMeter value for pre-clinical and discovery stage transactions has remained stable throughout our analysis. This quarter continued the increase we observed last quarter to an average BioMeter value of $33.4 million across five transactions, led by the $80 million paid up front by Pfizer for the rights to the chimeric antigen receptor t-cell immunotherapy platform from Cellectis (the $80 million excludes an additional equity investment from Pfizer), and the $50 million paid up front by Bristol-Myers Squibb for the rights to CytomX’s Probody therapeutics against four oncology targets. As large pharma are decreasing their own R&D spending, they are investing heavily in promising new areas to provide long-term pipeline replenishment. This bodes well for the continued funding of novel therapeutics approaches.