While You Were Eating Chili and Drinking Beer

Sometimes coming up with a headline for our weekend roundup can be difficult. This was not one of those times.

While we went with what we figured was the most universal of Super Sunday experiences, we had choices. Also considered: While You Were Watching It For the Ads, While You Were Giants, While You Were Eli-d, While You Weren't Going Undefeated, While You Were Choking, While You Were Jumping Off the Pats' Bandwagon, While You Were Participating in the Unauthorized Use of Game Footage Without the Express Written Consent of the NFL, and While You Were Praying There Would Be No Tom Petty Wardrobe Malfunction.

Some of us here at the IN VIVO Blog are Eagles fans (no, really, we probably haven't mentioned it before) and so the only suitable Superbowl outcome would have been for both teams to get disqualified somehow. But alas, at least it was a tight game.

Believe it or not there was more than Super Sunday and Super Tuesday prognosticating going on this weekend. Or so we heard.

• Amgen and Takeda inked a broad alliance to develop and commercialize 13 Amgen products in Japan. In a second and related deal, Takeda becomes Amgen's worldwide partner for the Phase II oncology candidate AMG-706 (motesanib). Amgen gets up-front payments of $200 million and $100 million respectively, and a further hundreds of millions in milestones and R&D expense sharing, plus royalties on Japan sales (and worldwide 50/50 profit sharing on motesanib). Takeda is also acquiring Amgen's Japanese subsidiary Amgen KK.
  
• From the Financial Times: a preview of GSK's forthcoming results this week with one key question--can the Big Pharma get FDA approval for Cervarix? We weighed in on this question on Friday.
  
• [Self Promotion Alert] The line-up for our Pharmaceutical Strategic Outlook conference in New York (March 18-20) keeps on getting better.

Photo from Flickr user jwinfred used under a Creative Commons license