Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant known for making insulin, is acquiring Loxo Oncology for $8 billion in cash, the companies said today. Loxo has one FDA-approved cancer drug and a few others undergoing clinical testing.
Why it matters: Big pharma companies, eager to find to new medications to add to their sales lineups, are eyeing cancer drugs. This marks the second major drug acquisition in the past week, following Bristol-Myers Squibb's $74 billion takeover of Celgene.
2019 will likely be a wild year for the policy, politics and business of health care.
The big picture: Here are the big trends the Axios health care team will be watching in 2019. They'll have an impact from K Street in Washington, D.C. to Main Street in your hometown.
This week's mega-deal was the announced $74 billion acquisition of Celgene by Bristol-Myers Squibb. BMS is paying one share of its own stock, plus $50 in cash, for each share of Celgene, which works out to about $68 billion at current prices. The combined company looks to be worth on the order of $150 billion, making it the 6th-largest pharmaceutical company in the world.
The big picture: Pharmaceutical mega-mergers are common. (Wikipedia has an exhaustive list.) Pfizer, in particular, is a product of M&A, having bought Pharmacia, Wyeth and Warner-Lambert in deals worth a combined $244 billion. Meanwhile, technology mega-mergers are rare, with the disastrous exception of AOL-Time Warner.
