Deal Snapshot: CEO Stoffels delivered on a recent promise to bring in mid-stage assets, acquiring a firm with a Phase I/IIa CAR-T therapy program for €125m ($131.6m) up front.

Totals for aggregate deals and in the M&A, alliance and divestment categories were similar among the 10 busiest deal makers from 2020 to 2021, but COVID-19 may have driven a more hectic deal-making pace overall in 2020.

The Swiss giant is paying up to $1.5bn upfront to get hold of Gyroscope's AAV2-based one-time investigational gene therapy for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of dry AMD that leads to irreversible vision loss.

The 2021 collaboration between Abbvie and Regenxbio to develop an anti-VEGF gene therapy for chronic retinal diseases is a noteworthy deal in the gene therapy space. But for both clinical and commercial reasons, it is a one-off opportunity and not an indicator of the overall potential of gene therapies to address eye diseases. Interest in optogenetics, however, which is the introduction of light-sensing genes into cells in the eye to restore vison, may be on the rise.