Life Sciences Highlights for H1 2022

In the first half of 2022, our teams advised on 80 mergers, acquisitions, venture capital financings and other transactions in the Life Sciences sector. Highlights include advising:

• Modernizing Medicine, a cloud-based, integrated electronic health records and practice management system, in its acquisition of Klara, an end-to-end virtual healthcare platform and messaging application.
• Twist Bioscience (Nasdaq: TWST), a synthetic biology company, in its registered underwritten public offering of 5,227,272 shares of common stock, resulting in a net proceed of approximately $269.4 million.
• Kineta, a developer of novel immuno-therapies designed to facilitate the treatment of RNA viruses, in its acquisition of Yumanity Therapeutics (NAS: YMTX), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, by way of a reverse merger.
• Ipsen (PAR: IPN), a specialty and generic drug manufacturing company, on its acquisition of Epizyme (NAS: EPZM), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that’s committed to rewriting treatment for cancer and other serious diseases.

Showcasing our litigation strengths in the life sciences sector, last month, an Orrick appellate team engineered the reversal of a $120 million judgment for Johnson & Johnson in talc litigation. (The team had previously helped reduce the original verdict from $325 million to $120 million). American Lawyer recognized our team as “Litigators of the Week” for the win, which is the second major reversal we’ve secured in the J&J talc litigation in the last 18 months. These decisions not only wiped-out massive judgments, but established precedent supporting J&J’s central legal position in hundreds of similar cases pending across the country.