After a frantic second quarter, M&A steadied with just under $30 billion across 22 total transactions, according to a BioSpace analysis.
The pace of M&A slowed to a crawl toward the end of the third quarter, but not before Vertex Pharmaceuticals took home one of the largest transactions of the year.
The July 6 acquisition of Crinetics Pharmaceuticals earned Vertex—a company that rarely buys—the honor of the fourth biggest deal of the year so far. The deal was originally tallied at $10 billion by the companies, but with debt and other factors, S&P Capital IQ valued it at $8.8 billion. The deal pushed the cystic fibrosis drugmaker into new territory: the specialty endocrinology market.
Vertex may have spent the most in Q3 but Eli Lilly, worth $1 trillion, was unsurprisingly the most prolific in Q3, striking two new deals for a total of 11 so far this year, worth a cumulative worth $31.7 billion. Lilly’s largest buy was Centessa Pharmaceuticals for $8.1 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ.
Also busy in the third quarter was Tarsus Pharmaceuticals, a small drugmaker worth just $3.6 billion, that made two buys to build out its eye disease pipeline. The first was iRenix Medical for $567 million in July, then Alkeus Pharmaceuticals in a deal valued at $800 million in August.
Overall, the third quarter was quiet when compared to the feeding frenzy of Q2, when buyers spent $78 billion on 31 total deals. In Q3, biopharmas spent just under $30 billion across 22 total transactions. That brings the year’s totals to 74 deals and about $156.9 billion billion spent.
