Private Company Edition: Venture capital mega-rounds continue a brisk pace with machine learning-based drug discovery firm insitro and gene therapy developer Graphite Bio among recent $100m-plus deals. Also, Argobio raised €50m to fund five start-ups in Europe. 

Q1 biopharma financing totaled $5.7 billion, a sharp drop from Q4, but this time early-stage venture rounds were the most popular fundraising vehicle;Q1 M&A also declined, totaling $12.3 billion, mostly from Mylan's $9.9 billion buy of Meda. The top alliance was again by Sanofi, in a five-year potential $2.26 billion collaboration with DiCE Molecules to develop oral small-molecule therapies against up to 12 targets.

J&J Innovation's spate of deals led a busy week of deal-making involving many big pharmas. Sanofi exited its inhaled insulin partnership with MannKind, Merck collaborated with Quartet and Complix, Roche partnered with and helped finance C4, and Pfizer signed an immuno-oncology combo trial agreement with Syndax.