Eli Lilly continues to spend its GLP-1 landfall with four new deals in the past week, including three in the vaccine space; the obesity leader also touted surgery-like results for its next-gen weight loss drug; Moderna’s stock climbs on the hantavirus “fear trade”; and in oncology, all eyes are on Revolution at ASCO this week.
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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 of vaccine development with 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 diseases a few months after stepping down as director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in March 2025.
Outside of vaccines, Lilly scooped up preclinical biotech Engage Bio for $202 million and teamed up with AI company Collaborative Drug Discovery for its life sciences data management solutions. These deals and Lilly’s skyrocketing revenue pushed the Indianapolis-based company to the top of IDEA Pharma’s list of 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 that next-gen asset retatrutide led 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 acquisition of 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 a surprising uptick in 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 AstraZeneca breaking the drought at the end of April with the first FDA adcomm in nine months.
The annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology starts on Friday in Chicago, where all eyes will be on Revolution Medicines’ investigational pancreatic cancer pill, which last month nearly doubled 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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