Eli Lilly announced that it will acquire three vaccine-centered biotech companies. The deals with Washington state-based Curevo, Swiss LimmaTech Biologics, and Maryland-based Vaccine Company, are worth up to $3.8 billion.
According to the company, the acquisitions build its “infectious disease legacy and reinforce its commitment to prevention strategies that reduce the long-term burden of serious disease.”
“These acquisitions reflect a deliberate strategy to prevent disease at its source rather than treat its consequences,” Daniel M. Skovronsky, Chief Scientific and Product Officer and President of Lilly Research Laboratories, said in a statement. “Decades of evidence now link common infections to diseases that potentially emerge years later, including neurological disease, cancer and infertility. And as antimicrobial resistance erodes our ability to treat bacterial infections, vaccines are increasingly the only path to prevention. Combining these companies’ platforms and teams with Lilly’s global scale positions us to change that trajectory.”
Curevo’s leading product candidate is amezosvatein, which aims to prevent shingles in adults. LimmaTech Biologics is developing inoculations against bacterial pathogens resisting current antimicrobials, and Vaccine Company is developing In Vivo Nanoparticle (IVN) technologies, which Eli Lilly described as being designed to enable the antigen display known to elicit durable immune responses associated with virus-like particle vaccines, while avoiding the manufacturing burden of traditional VLP production.”
Last year, the White House announced an agreement with Eli Lilly to cut the cost of some drugs. Eli Lilly Chair and CEO David Ricks said the agreement is a “pivotal moment in U.S. health care policy and a defining milestone for Lilly, made possible through collaboration with the Trump Administration.”
