A small-cap biotech de­vel­op­ing gene ther­a­pies is spin­ning out its Parkin­son’s dis­ease pro­gram in­to a new com­pa­ny in part­ner­ship with a se­cre­tive AI start­up co-found­ed by for­mer Google CEO Er­ic Schmidt.

MeiraGTx said Thurs­day it will get $200 mil­lion up­front in a deal with Holo­gen AI, a UK-based com­pa­ny still in stealth. MeiraGTx's AAV-GAD pro­gram will be housed in a new­co called Holo­gen Neu­ro AI, and Holo­gen has com­mit­ted to ad­di­tion­al fund­ing of up to $230 mil­lion to push AAV-GAD through Phase 3 stud­ies, which are ex­pect­ed to be­gin in mid-2025.

MeiraGTx will own a 30% stake in the new ven­ture while still be­ing re­spon­si­ble for all clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing ac­tiv­i­ties. Holo­gen will get a mi­nor­i­ty stake in MeiraGTx’s man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­sidiary. And Holo­gen Neu­ro AI will al­so work on oth­er pro­grams in­volv­ing the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem, in­clud­ing one for ge­net­ic obe­si­ty called AAV-BD­NF. MeiraGTx's stock MGTX was up about 28% on Thurs­day morn­ing.

Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s picks to lead the FDA and NIH are one step clos­er to con­fir­ma­tion af­ter ad­vanc­ing out of a Sen­ate com­mit­tee on Thurs­day.

The Sen­ate HELP com­mit­tee vot­ed 14-9 for FDA nom­i­nee Mar­ty Makary, and 12-11 for NIH nom­i­nee Jay Bhat­tacharya. The full Sen­ate votes haven’t yet been sched­uled, but con­fir­ma­tion ap­pears like­ly.

“We need pub­lic health lead­ers com­mit­ted to trans­paren­cy and find­ing un­bi­ased so­lu­tions to Amer­i­cans’ most chal­leng­ing health prob­lems,” Sen. Bill Cas­sidy (R-LA) said ahead of the vote. “Dr. Bhat­tacharya and Dr. Makary have demon­strat­ed that they are ready to take on this re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.”

Makary and Bhat­tacharya breezed through their re­spec­tive Sen­ate hear­ings last week, fac­ing few dif­fi­cult ques­tions and giv­ing most­ly safe an­swers. The nom­i­nees both ex­pressed sup­port for vac­cines, said they weren’t in­volved in Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion de­ci­sions to cut staff, and promised to look in­to those cuts.

Ace­lyrin and Pli­ant Ther­a­peu­tics, both of which are viewed as takeover tar­gets for Kevin Tang’s Con­cen­tra Bio­sciences, each adopt­ed a “poi­son pill” on Thurs­day morn­ing.

Ace­lyrin, a strug­gling im­munol­o­gy biotech that’s faced sev­er­al clin­i­cal set­backs since its close­ly watched IPO in 2023, is in the process of merg­ing with Alu­mis in an all-stock deal. It has re­ferred to Con­cen­tra’s of­fer, which was dis­closed last week, as a less “su­pe­ri­or pro­pos­al” than the pend­ing merg­er.

Ace­lyrin said that Con­cen­tra now owns 8.8% of the com­pa­ny in a “con­tin­ued rapid ac­cu­mu­la­tion” of shares. Tang found­ed Con­cen­tra two years ago.

At the same time, Con­cen­tra this week took a 9.6% stake in Pli­ant, an­oth­er strug­gling biotech that just dis­con­tin­ued a Phase 2b tri­al for its lead pro­gram, an ex­per­i­men­tal id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis treat­ment called bex­ote­grast.