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Eli Lilly $LLY +2.24% agreed to acquire three vaccine developers — Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics, and Vaccine Company — in deals worth up to roughly $3.8 billion combined, according to Bloomberg.
According to Reuters, all three transactions reflect Lilly's ambitions to establish a foothold in the business of preventing infectious diseases. The Curevo deal centers on an adult shingles vaccine candidate, with the acquisition structured to deliver its shareholders as much as $1.5 billion — an initial sum at closing followed by an additional payment tied to a specified development milestone. For LimmaTech Biologics, whose pipeline targets bacterial pathogens, equity holders stand to collect up to $780 million, with the total comprising a payment at signing plus further sums contingent on hitting certain development benchmarks.
The third deal involves Vaccine Company, a privately held preclinical biotechnology company developing vaccines for infectious diseases, the company said. The price tag for Vaccine Company could reach $1.55 billion in total, structured as an initial cash payment combined with additional amounts unlocked by clinical and commercial milestones. Its lead program is a Phase 1-ready candidate targeting Epstein-Barr virus, a pathogen that infects the vast majority of the global population and has been linked to multiple sclerosis and several cancers. The company's technology uses engineered nanoparticles to display multiple antigens simultaneously, an approach designed to generate durable immune responses while reducing manufacturing complexity compared with traditional virus-like particle vaccines, the company said.
