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Triple Play: Lilly Acquires Three Developers of Infectious Disease Vaccines for Up-to-$3.8B

Published

2 weeks ago

May 26, 2026

Eli Lilly has agreed to acquire three privately-held developers of vaccines for infectious diseases for a combined up to $3.83 billion cash, the companies said today, in deals intended to expand the acquisitive pharma giant’s R&D efforts into infectious disease—and which represent Lilly’s eighth, ninth, and 10th planned buyouts of smaller biotechs this year alone.

Lilly announced planned acquisitions of Vaccine Company for up to $1.55 billion, Curevo for up to $1.5 billion, and LimmaTech Biologics for up to $780 million. The planned triple play of buyouts, Lilly said, will enable it to apply differentiated technology platforms toward attacking infectious diseases, focusing on viral pathogens linked to long-term neurological and oncological risk, plus bacterial pathogens long considered difficult to prevent or treat.

“These acquisitions reflect a deliberate strategy to prevent disease at its source rather than treat its consequences,” Daniel M. Skovronsky, MD, PhD, chief scientific and product officer, and president, 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,” Skovronsky added. “Combining these companies’ platforms and teams with Lilly’s global scale positions us to change that trajectory.”

Investors appeared to support the triple play, sending Lilly shares up 1.36% to $1,079.19 as of 11:56 a.m. ET, from $1,065 at Friday’s close of trading.

Capitalizing on tirzepatide billions

The deal spree reflects Lilly’s desire to capitalize on the billions of dollars it is generating from sales of its obesity and diabetes drugs based on glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor analysts alone or in tandem with a glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP).

Those drugs account for 58% or $49.329 billion of the $84.978 billion in revenues reported by Lilly in 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. Lilly markets tirzepatide, a GLP-1/GIP dual agonist, in obesity as Zepbound^® ($13.542 billion in 2025, $4.16 billion in first quarter 2026) and in diabetes as Mounjaro^® ($22.965 billion, $8.662 billion in Q1 ‘26).

Lilly executives did not mention infectious diseases as a potential area of future growth during the company’s most recent earnings call last month with analysts following Q1 results, even as it cited three other therapeutic areas: I&I (immunology and inflammation), neuroscience, and oncology.

“We’re proud of what we’re doing in those three areas, and I think each of them has very significant unmet medical needs that we can scale into as our medicines are successful. We like what we got, and we like the direction we’re going. Of course, in each of those areas, we also see opportunities to get a lot bigger, and we’ve highlighted some of the themes already in those areas,” Skovronsky said on the April 30 call.

“Even without the obesity and metabolic business, Lilly would be the fastest or surely one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical companies in the industry,” Skovronsky added.

Parade of purchases

Lilly’s long parade of purchases began January 7 when it inked a $1.2 billion acquisition of Ventyx Biosciences, an NLRP3-targeting oral drug developer focused on inflammatory diseases. A month earlier, Lilly announced plans to buy out circular RNA cell therapy developer Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4 billion, targeting advancements in cell therapy. And in March, Lilly committed up to $7.8 billion to acquire Centessa Therapeutics, a developer of sleep disorder drugs.

Last month, Lilly agreed to acquire three cancer drug companies—in vivo chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T) developer Kelonia Therapeutics for up to $7 billion; JAK inhibitor developer Ajax Therapeutics for up to $2.3 billion; and next-generation dual-payload antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) developer CrossBridge Bio for up to $300 million.

Just last week on May 20, non-viral DNA delivery-focused drug developer Engage Biologics announced it had been acquired by Lilly for up to $202 million cash, including an upfront payment and payments upon achieving specified development milestones.

As for the latest planned acquisitions:

South San Francisco, CA-based Vaccine Company is developing in vivo nanoparticle (IVN) technologies 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. The company is advancing a preclinical pipeline spanning multiple viral pathogens; the lead program applies this technology to Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) with a five-antigen Phase I-ready candidate.

Preventing mono and consequences

Lilly and Vaccine Company reason that a prophylactic vaccine could prevent not only acute infectious mononucleosis but also long-term neurological and oncological consequences that may follow infection, given what it said was growing evidence linking EBV to multiple sclerosis and several malignancies,

Under the acquisition deal, Lilly agreed to give Vaccine Company shareholders up to $1.55 billion, which would include an undisclosed upfront payment and additional payments tied to achieving specified clinical and commercial milestones.

LimmaTech Biologics, based near Zurich in Schlieren, Switzerland, is a developer of vaccines targeting bacterial pathogens for which rising antimicrobial resistance is steadily closing therapeutic options, including Staphylococcus aureus, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Chlamydia trachomatis. LimmaTech’s platform is designed to generate broad, durable immune responses against complex bacterial targets by targeting the toxins and superantigens that drive disease.

LimmaTech’s lead program, LTB-SA7, is in Phase I development as a vaccine against S. aureus, the leading cause of surgical-site infection. The company has also developed a preclinical pipeline of candidates targeting additional bacterial pathogens, including those that drive infertility and other long-term consequences of infection that fall disproportionately on women.

Lilly has agreed to acquire LimmaTech for up to $780 million, which will include an undisclosed upfront payment and additional potential payments also tied to achieving specified clinical and regulatory milestones.

Seeking greater tolerability

Bothell, WA-based Curevo has an infectious disease vaccine pipeline led by amezosvatein, an adjuvanted subunit vaccine being developed for the prevention of shingles in adults. Curevo acknowledges that the current standard of care for shingles prevention, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s Shingrix^® (Zoster Vaccine Recombinant, Adjuvanted) is effective, but says tolerability challenges can limit overall vaccination rates and contribute to second-dose hesitancy, leaving a meaningful portion of patients with reduced or no protection against shingles and its long-term consequences.

To prevent that problem, amezosvatein has been engineered with a next-generation synthetic adjuvant. In a Phase II trial head-to-head against Shingrix, amezosvatein matched immune response across all primary endpoints and reduced side effects such as activity-limiting fatigue, chills, and pain at the injection site by more than half. Lilly and Curevo reason that in light of growing evidence linking shingles to elevated risk of stroke and tying shingles vaccination to lower risk of dementia, a better-tolerated vaccine could reduce these long-term risks, thus expanding the reach of shingles prevention.

Lilly’s up to $1.5 billion deal price for Curevo includes another upfront payment and an additional payment hinging upon achievement of a certain milestone, all unspecified.

All three deals are subject to customary closing conditions, including expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976. Lilly said it will determine the accounting treatment of the transactions upon closing, in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The transactions will be reflected in Lilly’s future financial results and financial guidance to investors.

That guidance was raised last month after Lilly reported stellar first quarter earnings tied to booming sale of its blockbuster tirzepatide-based drugs. Lilly raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to between $82 billion and $85 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) guidance to be in the range of $35.50 to $37.00.

In February, Lilly guided investors to between $80 billion and $83 billion in revenue, and non-GAAP EPS ranging from of $33.50 to $35.00.

The post Triple Play: Lilly Acquires Three Developers of Infectious Disease Vaccines for Up-to-$3.8B appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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STAT+: At hospital finance conference, a call to end the friction that’s keeping costs high

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — At this week’s annual meeting of hospital finance leaders, the exhibit hall was packed with dozens of billing and collections companies. Armed with candy, tote bags, and pens, they smiled at passersby, eager to explain why their tactics would extract the most money from health insurers.

The sheer number of “revenue cycle” vendors who attended the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s annual conference in Maryland — outnumbering even the hospital attendees, according to a list shared by an organizer — was a visible reminder of the enormous industry built around just paying medical bills.

The U.S. health care industry spends roughly $200 billion annually on financial transactions: claims processing, payment, collections, and prior authorization. And yet the proliferation of billing vendors seemed to clash with the main theme of HFMA’s conference, affordability, spotlighting the need to simplify the billing process so that health care is less costly and more accessible for patients.

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Published

3 hours ago

June 12, 2026

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Beyond sunshine: Iberia’s biotech moment has arrived with developing capital networks

Published

4 hours ago

June 12, 2026

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Strong science, lower costs and growing capital networks are putting Spain and Portugal on the biotech investment map, even as structural bottlenecks persist, according to two investors.

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Laser‑Driven Phase Contrast Enhances Cryo‑EM Resolution of Small Proteins

Published

9 hours ago

June 12, 2026

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You know when you are at the eye doctor getting an updated prescription, and suddenly the world snaps into sharper focus? Physicists at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have now done something similar for electron microscopy. By introducing phase contrast into a cryo‑electron microscope, they have delivered dramatically sharper images of some of biology’s smallest and most elusive proteins.

The advance comes from a new laser phase plate (LPP), described in the paper “Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo‑EM,” which was published recently in Science. Led by physicist Holger Mueller, PhD, of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the team demonstrated that a laser‑driven phase plate can overcome one of cryo‑EM’s most persistent limitations: poor contrast for small proteins.

Cryo-EM images of two proteins, apoferritin and hemoglobin, taken without and with a laser phase plate. The images are analyzed in a computer to produce detailed 3D structures of the proteins. [Holger Müller, Jessie Zhang/UC Berkeley]

Cryo‑EM has transformed structural biology over the past decade, earning a Nobel Prize in 2017 for enabling high‑resolution structures without crystallization. But despite its impact, the technique still struggles with proteins below ~70 kilodaltons—a size range that includes about 90% of the human proteome. “Because of signal-to-noise limitations, the majority of human and animal proteins are too small to be analyzed by these methods [cryo-EM and cryoelectron tomography]. The increase in signal-to-noise ratio provided by this laser phase plate is expected to overcome these important limitations.”

The new LPP begins to address that problem. The LPP uses an intense, continuous‑wave laser to shift the phase of the electron beam itself. This produces true phase contrast without dimming or destabilizing the beam. Mueller described the laser focus as “75 kilowatts focused to a few microns… That’s more powerful than what you use for welding. It has more power than a military laser. It builds up the brightest continuous laser focus ever.”

Installed in a custom Thermo Fisher Titan Krios, the LPP immediately improved the clarity and resolvability of small proteins, including hemoglobin, which sits at the lower limit of what today’s cryo‑EM instruments can handle. As the authors wrote in the abstract: “Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP)… enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment.”

phase plate cover Cryo-EM — A laser (purple) is powerfully amplified by highly polished mirrors and focused on the electron beam (blue) to shift its phase and increase the cryo-EM microscope’s contrast, allowing biologists to image smaller proteins and the crowded structures inside cells. [Sayo Studio]

These improvements were achieved using standard defocus ranges and reconstruction workflows. “For the most challenging cases—small particles, bad specimens—the laser produces a very considerable advantage,” Mueller said.

The impact extends beyond single‑particle analysis. Cryo‑electron tomography (cryo‑ET), which assembles multiple angular views of a molecule or protein into a three-dimensional image, stands to benefit even more. “With cryo-ET, we’re looking at small, very complicated cellular material that’s incredibly crowded inside the cell,” said Bridget Carragher, PhD, founding technical director of imaging at Biohub. “It’s like a forest of trees, and you’re trying to find one leaf on one tree in there. Cryo-ET needs a dramatic step forward in contrast, so we can start to see what’s going on inside the cell. That’s what the laser phase plate promises to give us.”

Biohub is developing a dual‑laser version of the system, designed to reduce component wear and minimize aberrations. Meanwhile, Mueller’s team is pushing toward imaging proteins as small as 17 kilodaltons, a threshold that would open access to vast regions of the human proteome previously invisible to cryo‑EM.

“This technology is a step function change for biology,” said Stephani Otte, PhD, Biohub’s vice president of imaging science. “What was once invisible will become visible—and that changes everything about how we understand disease.”

“The bottom line is, if you have a large protein and a really good sample—a fresh one or one frozen without bubbles, for example—you may not need the phase plate to get a single, high-quality image. But for a small protein and a bad sample, laser-on is best,” Mueller said. “This could fill an enormous gap in our knowledge of protein structures that can’t be crystallized or are too small for today’s cryo-EM. And it will be revolutionary for cryo-ET.”

The post Laser‑Driven Phase Contrast Enhances Cryo‑EM Resolution of Small Proteins appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.