Eli Lilly will acquire biotech company Kelonia Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $7 billion, the company said Monday.
Lilly will pay $3.25 billion upfront, and the remaining payments are contingent upon clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones, it said. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026.
Kelonia is developing technology to reprogram patients’ T-cells inside the body so those cells can attack cancer, called in vivo CAR-T. Current treatments require that work to be done outside the body, or ex vivo, a process that involves harvesting cells, engineering them in a lab and then reintroducing them. While logistically intensive, the procedure has been successful for blood cancers like multiple myeloma.
“It’s an intravenously delivered therapy, one time,” Jacob Van Naarden, president of Lilly oncology and head of corporate business development, said in an interview. “It targets your body’s T-cells, transforms them into attacking the cancer in the body, and requires no preconditioning at all.”
Johnson & Johnson’s CAR-T treatment for multiple myeloma, Carvykti, accounted for $1.89 billion in sales last year. Gilead recently acquired partner Arcellx and its rival to J&J’s drug, called anito-cel, for $7.8 billion.
Ex-vivo CAR-T involves waiting weeks for a patient’s blood cells to be engineered. It requires patients to receive chemotherapy to clear out old cells and make room for the engineered ones, a process known as pre-conditioning. The procedure has thus far been limited to mostly academic medical centers that have expertise in the process.
Lilly’s Van Naarden called Kelonia’s data “nothing short of remarkable.” He said he recognizes the competition but sees the convenience of a one-time infusion as an attractive option. Outside of multiple myeloma, Lilly plans to use Kelonia’s technology to treat other blood cancers, and possibly solid tumors.
“We’re going to be a player in hematology,” he said. “It’s nice to have another medicine to go to those doctors with a medicine that can be used broadly, that isn’t relegated to academic medical centers who can do ex-vivo personalized cell therapy.”
Lilly has been on a dealmaking spree this year, announcing several acquisitions like sleep disorder drug developer Centessa Pharmaceuticals and cell therapy company Orna Therapeutics. Van Naarden said the deals are all part of Lilly’s plan to grow beyond the GLP-1 drugs for obesity and diabetes that Lilly is best known for.
“Right now, Lilly is thought of as a weight loss company, and that’s a very large part of our business,” Van Naarden said. “But over time, the goal, very intentionally, is to use the financial strength that the incretin and the weight loss business is providing us to help diversify the business into the other therapeutic areas even more so.”
Some of Lilly’s recent deals have come with bigger price tags and later-stage experimental drugs than Lilly has typically bought up. The company has historically focused on small, early-stage deals for unproven science.
Van Naarden said the company has made a slight shift in strategy to keep doing the high-volume, early-stage dealmaking as well as later-stage deals for experimental drugs with more clinical data.
“The challenge with the high-volume, early-stage deal making is most of that will turn into nothing. We know that, and that’s OK. That’s the nature of those bets,” Van Naarden said. “There’s another side of the spectrum, where you can spend a little bit more money, you can still create value through the deals in the long term, but they have some de-risking. You’ve seen clinical data that shows these things work, and then you feel much better about having a tangible medicine at the end of the journey. Those things, of course, cost more.”
Even factoring in the deals Lilly has already done, when asked if there could be more ahead, Van Naarden said, “We don’t feel constrained.”