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Eli Lilly has been as acquisitive as ever, striking five new deals in the past week alone. On Tuesday, the company dove into the deep end ofvaccine developmentwith three separate buys in the space: Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics and Vaccine Company. The infectious disease work will likely be led by a vaccine veteran: Peter Marks, who assumed the role of Lilly’s senior vice president for molecule discovery and the head of infectious diseasesa few monthsafter stepping down as director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in March 2025.
Outside of vaccines, Lilly scooped up preclinical biotechEngage Biofor $202 million and teamed up with AI companyCollaborative Drug Discoveryfor its life sciences data management solutions. These deals and Lilly’s skyrocketing revenue pushed the Indianapolis-based company to thetop of IDEA Pharma’s listof best inventors and innovators. It’s the first year that a single company has swept the two categories.
Lilly also continues to make headlines for its impressive data readouts, especially in the weight-loss space that it now reigns supreme. Last week, Lilly announced thatnext-gen asset retatrutideled to weight loss of 70 pounds, or 28.3% at 80 weeks, setting a new benchmark for the space. And in the cardiovascular space, Lilly’s$1.3 billion acquisitionof Verve Therapeutics is so far going well for the Big Pharma, this week yielding Phase 1 results for a cholesterol-lowering gene therapy.
Though not stealing as many headlines as Lilly, Moderna also made news this week with asurprising uptickin its share price that analysts are attributing to the so-called “fear trade” that is rising amid reports of a cluster of cases of hantavirus. Moderna also announced that its mRNA flu shot—initially turned away from the FDA but later accepted for review—will be discussed at an advisory committee on June 18. Notably, such meetings have been largely absent from the regulator’s processes of late, with AstraZenecabreaking the droughtat the end of April with the first FDA adcomm in nine months.
The annual conference of theAmerican Society of Clinical Oncologystarts on Friday in Chicago, where all eyes will be on Revolution Medicines’ investigational pancreatic cancer pill, which last month nearlydoubled overall survival, and on Akeso’s closely watched Phase 3 trial HARMONi-6 for its Summit Therapeutics-partnered PD-1/VEGF bispecific ivonescimab. Data for each of these assets will be presented at plenary sessions at the meeting.
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