Pharma/Biotech Deal Pipeline, 7/21-25/08

A quick recap of major deals in the week that was, with a big hat tip to the In Vivo Blog:

• Obviously, the big kahuna of the week was Roche's $43.7 billion bid for Genentech. But Roche wasn't close to finished: The Swiss drugmaker also paid C$191 million ($189.3 million) for the Canadian biotech Arius Research, a developer of antibody-screening systems, and $125 million for Mirus Bio, a Wisconsin biotech with a proprietary RNA-interference technology. The Mirus deal also marks Roche's second foray into RNAi in the past year.
• Sanofi-Aventis offered £276 million ($548.4 million) to acquire vaccine-maker Acambis, with whom Sanofi has been working for roughly a decade.
• BioMarin Pharmaceutical agreed to pay $7 million upfront and up to $136 million in possible milestone and royalty payments to Summit for a drug intended to fight muscular dystrophy.
• GlaxoSmithKline struck a deal with South Africa's Aspen to break into the generic-drug market across the developing world.