Major industry collaborations continued to shape pipelines: Novartis struck a discovery and development alliance with UK biotech Relation Therapeutics that could deliver up to $1.7 billion in milestones to advance AI‑driven targets in atopic and immune‑dysregulation diseases. The deal couples Relation’s functional genomics/AI platform with Novartis’s development engine. Separately, Zealand Pharma sealed a multi‑program strategic agreement with OTR Therapeutics to discover and develop small‑molecule cardiometabolic candidates, a pact valued publicly at up to $2.5 billion. Zealand will receive upfront payments and option economics to expand beyond its peptide franchise. These transactions illustrate big pharma’s continued strategy: paying to access computational and platform innovation while diversifying modality mixes across metabolic and immune indications.