Eli Lilly has agreed to buy three vaccine-specialist biotechs in a bolstering of its infectious disease portfolio, continuing the drugmaker’s streak of dealmaking in 2026.
Lilly has outlaid up to $3.83bn to buy Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics, and Vaccine Company. Curevo is being acquired for up to $1.5bn, while LimmaTech is being bought for $780m. The Vaccine Company acquisition is the most valuable, commanding a fee of $1.55bn, with all three deals including an upfront fee and milestone payments.
Curevo describes its work as being focused on a “new generation of adjuvant subunit vaccines”. The biotech’s lead programme is amezosvatein, a vaccine in development for the prevention of shingles in adults. Curevo highlights head-to-head Phase II data showing that amezosvatein has better tolerability than GSK’s Shingrix, the primary vaccine used to prevent shingles, while maintaining comparable efficacy. Lilly states that there is a “meaningful portion of patients” with reduced or no protection against shingles and its long-term consequences due to tolerability limitations of currently approved vaccines.
LimmaTech Biologics says it is “at the forefront of combating the global antimicrobial resistance epidemic”. The biotech is developing vaccines against bacterial pathogens for which rising antimicrobial resistance is limiting treatment options. These include the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Chlamydia trachomatis. LimmaTech’s lead programme, LTB-SA7, is a Phase I vaccine against S. aureus, a leading cause of surgical-site infections. Further bacterial pathogens are on the biotech’s pipeline horizon, including those that affect fertility and ones whose complications disproportionately impact women.
Finally, Vaccine Company is a preclinical biotech developing in vivo nanoparticle (IVN) technologies. This helps create vaccines that avoid manufacturing limitations of traditional virus-like particle vaccines, while eliciting the same long-lasting immune response. Vaccine Company already has a Phase I ready candidate for the highly contagious Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), though the company’s preclinical pipeline spans multiple viral pathogens.
Reacting to the deals, Citi analysts called the agreements a "well-balanced foray into a new area and note each company's lead asset could bring substantial market opportunity and platform validation for future products."
Lilly’s chief scientific and product officer, Daniel Skovronsky, said: "These acquisitions reflect a deliberate strategy to prevent disease at its source rather than treat its consequences. 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. Combining these companies' platforms and teams with Lilly's global scale positions us to change that trajectory."
Lilly M&A volume hits double digits in 2026
Lilly is enjoying a cash-rich period as sales of its obesity and type 2 diabetes drugs continue to surge. Not content with remaining idle, the drugmaker has taken a proactive stance on diversifying its pipeline through M&A in 2026.
The acquisitions for the trio of vaccine developers mark the eighth, ninth, and tenth companies it has bought this year. The most expensive of these was the $7.8bn deal to buy sleep drug biotech Centessa at the beginning of January. Lilly has also since bought gene therapy developer Kelonia Therapeutics for $7bn, and blood cancer specialist Ajax Therapeutics for $2.3bn, among others.
Editor's note: This article was updated shortly after publication to include analyst comment from Citi.
