Eli Lilly Buys 3 Vaccine Developers for Up to $4 Billion, Re-entering a Struggling Market
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 26
Eli Lilly Buys 3 Vaccine Developers for Up to $4 Billion, Re-entering a Struggling Market
12 articles · Updated · The New York Times · May 26
$4 billion in deals will give Eli Lilly three vaccine developers—Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics and Vaccine Company—even though none has a product on the market.
Lilly is using cash from blockbuster weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound to push back into vaccines after years focused on diabetes, obesity, cancer, immune diseases and Alzheimer's.
The move comes as the vaccine sector faces a tougher backdrop under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with policy shifts, weaker sales and fundraising pressure on smaller developers.
That makes Lilly's return notable in a business many large drugmakers had already deprioritized because infectious-disease products generally offered lower profits than other therapeutic areas.
For Lilly, now 150 years old, the acquisitions also reconnect the company with an older franchise that once included the polio vaccine in the 1950s and antibiotic blockbuster Ceclor in the late 1980s.
Fueled by weight-loss drug profits, how will Lilly's vaccine push change the pharmaceutical landscape?
Is Lilly's vaccine bet a strategic masterstroke or a costly distraction from its GLP-1 goldmine?