Eli Lilly is using the GLP-1 windfall to fund mergers and acquisitions and diversify the pipeline
Jacob Van Naarden is busy.
In addition to running Eli LillyAs head of business development, he is now responsible for identifying the drugmaker’s next opportunities. And Lilly, now the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, is hungrier than ever for deals.
“The financial strength of the company, driven primarily by the weight loss business, is very strong right now,” Van Naarden said in an interview at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting. “We have this almost generational opportunity to redeploy this capital across all of our disease areas to not only drive the company’s growth in the coming decades, but also to help many more patients with all kinds of diseases, and that’s why we’re executing on this strategy.”
Jacob S. Van Naarden, Executive Vice President; President of Lilly Oncology and Head of Corporate Business Development, Eli Lilly and Company.
Courtesy: Eli Lilly
Not even halfway through the year, Lilly has already announced plans to spend more than $10 billion up front and potentially as much as $25 billion on eight acquisitions. For all of last year, Lilly spent about $4 billion on about 40 deals.
Lilly’s business journey continued Wednesday with a partnership worth up to $1.9 billion with RNA editing company Ascidian Therapeutics to develop drugs for kidney disease.
The spending reflects a conscious shift in Lilly’s approach to dealmaking, as the company is now larger and more highly valued than ever before. According to LSEG, the company’s market cap is now about $1 trillion, up from $190 billion in 2021. Lilly is the first healthcare company to join the trillion-dollar club dominated by technology companies.
Previously, the drugmaker relied primarily on early-stage assets, which were low-cost because they were riskier. Now the company is using profits from its GLP-1 drugs like Mounjaro and Zepbound to develop experimental drugs that are more likely to work — and therefore have higher prices.
“These things are drugs,” Van Naarden said in a separate interview at his office in Stamford, Connecticut. “How big are they going to be? What’s the development plan? When are they going to be approved? I don’t know all that yet. Obviously we have projections, but you can see enough to say, OK, this is real, and we can get the insurance at a higher price than we pay for a real preclinical thing. So that’s been a big part of our focus, in addition to executing the high volume and early stage strategy.”
In this illustration photo taken in Athens, Greece, March 1, 2026, two Mounjaro KwikPen injection pens stand in front of the Eli Lilly logo displayed on a screen.
Nikos Pekiaridis | Photo only | Getty Images
Van Naarden said his boss, Lilly CEO Dave Ricks, approached him last fall to lead business development in addition to his primary role as head of Lilly’s oncology business. The company wanted to improve its business capabilities and expand its presence beyond the initial bets that Lilly liked to focus on.
He began implementing the strategy earlier this year.
Lilly’s planned takeover of Centessa Pharmaceuticals, The investment, announced in March, could reach as much as $7.8 billion if the company hits certain milestones for its experimental drugs for sleep disorders such as narcolepsy. That would make it Lilly’s second-largest deal ever, behind the company’s $8 billion acquisition of Loxo Oncology in 2019. Van Naarden was chief operating officer at Loxo at the time.
While the deals are big for Lilly, they total around $8 billion still low compared to agreements made by other large pharmaceutical companies. The question arises as to how big Lilly could grow.
Van Naarden doesn’t want to set arbitrary spending limits. He says it’s about how convincing the science is and how big the opportunity is for patients and Lilly.
Some of the deals announced this year fall under Lilly’s current areas of expertise oncology, neuroscience, cardiometabolic health and immunology. Others, like Lilly’s recently announced acquisition of three vaccine companies, will take the company into new areas.
“We’re looking at all sorts of things that don’t fit neatly into one of these four areas, so don’t be surprised if we have more for things that you know might not fit neatly into what we’ve done in the past,” Van Naarden said at ASCO this week. “When you see it, it means we are excited and believe we can make a big impact.”
Is there anything that’s off the table?
“No,” he said, “not really.”
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