Eli Lilly, with a busier-than-ever business development team, has made a major vaccine play‚ months after hiring veteran vaccine regulator Peter Marks following his FDA departure.
Eli Lilly is recommitting to infectious disease through the acquisition of three little-known biotechs for a combined value of $3.8 billion.
Leerink Partners called the deals a “power move into vaccines” and key diversification for the Indianapolis-based Big Pharma, which has become synonymous with its GLP-1 portfolio.
The deal may have been foreshadowed months earlier when Lilly hired former FDA regulator Peter Marks after his abrupt resignation. “Strategically, the trio of acquisitions is consistent with the Marks hire and signals LLY’s intent to be a vaccine innovator,” Leerink wrote on Tuesday morning.
“These acquisitions reflect a deliberate strategy to prevent disease at its source rather than treat its consequences,” Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific and product officer at Lilly Research Laboratories, said in a Tuesday release.
First in the lineup is Curevo, a private biotech developing the adjuvanted subunit vaccine amezosvatein for preventing shingles. This portion of the deal is worth up to $1.5 billion in cash, including an upfront payment to shareholders and an unspecified milestone offering.
With the new program, Lilly is set to go up against vaccine heavyweight GSK, which has marketed Shingrix for years. That preventative shingles vaccine booked about $4.8 billion in sales for 2025. But Lilly thinks there’s room for improvement on tolerability, which can lead to second-dose hesitancy for some people who receive the existing vaccine.
Enter Curevo, which has been quietly working on a vaccine for the disease that causes a painful skin rash. The Washington-based biotech raised $110 million last year in a series B to support amezosvatein, which similarly to Shingrix uses a subunit protein antigen called glycoprotein E. Curevo’s product differs from Shingrix as the adjuvant it contains has an optimized version of the TLR4 agonist that GSK’s product has proven to be active against the shingles virus, according to the biotech. At the time, Curevo said the money would go toward expanding its Phase 2 program and help finalize dose selection for a Phase 3 trial.
Lilly will not be alone in trying to come up with an improved shingles vaccine, with GSK also advancing a new candidate in Phase 3.
But the endeavor has proven difficult for companies to replicate. Pfizer and long-time mRNA partner BioNTech paused development of their candidate in February.
Second in Lilly’s deal triad is LimmaTech Biologics, which is developing vaccines against bacterial pathogens that are impacted by antimicrobial resistance. These include Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Chlamydia trachomatis.
The biotech’s lead program is LTB-SA7, which is in Phase 1 development for S. aureus, the leading cause of surgical-site infection. LimmaTech’s preclinical programs are examining possible vaccines for infections that cause infertility and other long-term complications.
This deal is worth up to $780 million, including an undisclosed upfront payment and other payouts based on certain regulatory and clinical milestones.
The final company to be brought under Lilly’s wing is Vaccine Company (VaxCo). The biotech will provide Lilly with an in vivo nanoparticle (IVN) technology platform that can ease manufacturing of virus-like particle vaccines.
VaxCo has preclinical programs for Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), with one ready for Phase 1. EBV has been linked to multiple sclerosis and several cancers, so a preventative treatment could address not only the initial infection but complications years down the road, the company said.
Lilly is offering up to $1.55 billion in cash for VaxCo, with an upfront payment and clinical and commercial milestones.
Ever acquisitive
The trio of deals is just the latest for Lilly’s busy business development team. As of the end of April, the company had inked six acquisitions. With the vaccine triplet, the company has now bought four companies in May with nonviral DNA delivery platform Engage Bio folding in for $202 million last week.
Lilly has also dealt in CAR T with Kelonia Therapeutics and Orna Therapeutics, plus gene therapy with Adverum Biotechnologies and Verve Therapeutics. April saw three cancer-focused acquisitions, including CrossBridge Bio.
Executives have made no secret of their desire to spend billions in earnings from the storied company’s lucrative weight loss and diabetes portfolio. Many of the deals marked the entry into new modalities and today’s vaccine-specific deals mark a turning point as Lilly recommits to the space.
“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,” Skovronsky said in Tuesday’s release. “Combining these companies’ platforms and teams with Lilly’s global scale positions us to change that trajectory.”
The infectious disease work will likely be led by a vaccine veteran: Marks, who found a home at Lilly after his abrupt resignation from the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in March 2025. In a widely-cited resignation letter, Marks detailed concerns about the handling of vaccine safety records by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a known vaccine skeptic.
Marks assumed the role of senior vice president for molecule discovery and the head of infectious diseases a few months after stepping down from the U.S. regulator.
Kennedy’s tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services has been tumultuous, to say the least. Many major vaccine makers—Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi and GSK—have seen declining vaccine rates in the U.S. eat into earnings.
Moderna, once a superstar for producing one of the two approved COVID-19 vaccines—has ceased new Phase 3 trials for infectious disease vaccines in the U.S. The biotech suffered an unexpected blow earlier this year when Kennedy’s FDA refused to even review an application for an mRNA flu vaccine—although the decision was later reversed and the shot is in regulatory review.
Lilly’s investment in the space comes at a critical time and mirrors what Sanofi’s ex-CEO Paul Hudson said earlier this year—that this period of vaccine hesitancy provides a great time to buy the dip. Sanofi acquired Dynavax last year for $2.2 billion while Pfizer plunked down $30 million upfront to work with Novavax in January.
