The agreement is for $70 million up front, plus research and development funding, but could bring up to $633 million more in future milestone payments and royalties. Ventus, whose CEO was chief medical officer at OxyContin-maker Purdue, raised $140 million earlier this year in a round co-led by SoftBank. (The Logic)

Talking point: Novo Nordisk is based in Denmark and works on treatments for diabetes and cardiovascular and blood diseases. Ventus is working on several potential medicines that work on a family of proteins that can play a role in liver and kidney diseases and other cardiometabolic conditions. It uses a proprietary drug-funding platform that looks for “binding pockets” in key proteins and designs molecules that can grab hold of them. It has two drugs at the preclinical phase, meaning Ventus is preparing to seek permission to try using them in humans for the first time, and others further behind in development. The new agreement gives Novo Nordisk exclusive rights to commercialize Ventus’s most advanced drug candidates.