STAT News – Biotech
STAT+: How an outsider crept into Eli Lilly’s top ranks — and plans to drive its business forward
Everything changed with a white envelope.
On Dec. 20, 2018, Jacob Van Naarden, the chief operating officer of a biotech called Loxo Oncology, and his boss, CEO Josh Bilenker, arrived at their Stamford, Conn., offices for a meeting with Levi Garraway, then the head of oncology research at Eli Lilly. Both remember that they planned a simple meeting of “hanging out” with Garraway and trading updates about their companies.
Neither, Van Naarden said, had looked at the calendar invite. “And so we walk into our conference room, and there’s like a room full of Lilly people,” Van Naarden told STAT. Garraway had brought Lilly’s chief scientific officer, its head of business development, the head of oncology, and the chief financial officer. After some awkward pleasantries, a single white envelope containing deal terms was slid across the table.
“I said something silly like, ‘If I’d known it was going to be this kind of meeting, I would have put on a jacket,’” Bilenker recalled. “‘But this looks like something my board needs to hear about.’” Van Naarden said the meeting lasted less than 20 minutes. He and Bilenker left the Lilly executives to their sandwiches. A month later, Eli Lilly purchased Loxo for $8 billion in cash.
Lilly’s purchase paid dividends not simply because of the cancer drugs and research Loxo brought the drug giant, but because Loxo’s executives have become key players in the company’s leadership team. In tech, deals done to get talent — acqui-hires — are common. In the pharmaceutical industry, they are not.
Bilenker left Loxo in 2021 to form a new firm, Treeline Biosciences, which has raised more than $1 billion in venture capital, according to Pitchbook. But Van Naarden not only now runs all of Eli Lilly’s oncology efforts, both research and development as well as sales and marketing, but as of 2025 served as the company’s head of business development, overseeing all dealmaking for a company that now claims the highest stock market value in the pharmaceutical industry.
WASHINGTON — Food and Drug Administration officials briefed senators on the agency’s plans for food policy for 2026, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
The agency plans to focus on infant formula safety, updating food labels, defining ultra-processed foods, expanding inspections of food processing plants, and bolstering seafood safety programs, according to a document shared with lawmakers, obtained by STAT.
The meeting comes amid a shift in the administration’s health agenda toward food issues and away from vaccine policy. In recent polls, food reforms have been more popular than the vaccine agenda, catching the attention of administration officials looking to sharpen their message for the midterms.
STAT News – Biotech
STAT+: In private meetings, White House works to win pharma companies’ support for drug pricing bill
WASHINGTON — The White House has drafted legislative text for its drug pricing policy, and officials are in the process of sharing it with more than a dozen major pharmaceutical companies, according to people familiar with the meetings.
The legislative text, according to a White House official, closely follows the outlines of the voluntary deals the administration made with pharma companies. The draft includes a policy that would allow drugs purchased in cash to count toward a patient’s deductible.
The Trump administration’s push for drug price legislation is part of a larger effort to get health reforms signed into law. The president’s focus on his affordability agenda in an election year has heightened the profile of the effort.
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