Eli Lilly, the most valuable pharma company in the world, is putting its vast cash coffers to work by pulling in another in vivo CAR-T cell therapy company. This time, it’s the pharma giant’s largest acquisition of the decade.
On the heels of a $2.4 billion acquisition of Orna Therapeutics in February, Lilly is upping the ante in the in vivo space with Monday’s announcement it would purchase private drugmaker Kelonia Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $7 billion, paying more than $3 billion up front.
Each of the deals reflects Big Pharma’s efforts to improve access to cancer cell therapies by reducing the complex manufacturing bottlenecks and long patient wait times for standard ex vivo treatments like bestsellers Yescarta from Gilead Sciences’ Kite Pharma and Carvykti from Johnson & Johnson. There are no in vivo cell therapies approved by the FDA.
This week’s purchase also showcases Lilly’s endeavors to make the most out of its windfall from the massive sales of obesity drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, and how the company is using that cash to bolster its efforts in areas like cancer.
While Kelonia’s lead program for an anti-B cell maturation antigen CAR-T cell multiple myeloma therapy is still in early-stage trials, Lilly leadership is also looking to the gene delivery platform that comes with it. Executive vice president and head of Lilly Oncology Jacob Van Naarden said in a press release that the treatment, called KLN-1010, is “highly encouraging, both as a potential step forward for patients with multiple myeloma and as proof of concept for Kelonia’s platform.”
Kelonia’s platform makes use of lentiviral delivery to send genetic messages to immune cells that instruct them to find and kill cancer cells. CEO Kevin Friedman pointed out that the in vivo approach, which doesn’t require the lengthy process of removing a patient’s cells for engineering before returning them, would result in “significantly reduced complexity and cost relative to ex vivo CAR-T cell approaches.”
In vivo cell therapies have become a hot commodity for Big Pharma, banking on the promise of these treatments without the backbreaking manufacturing and access challenges that come with their ex vivo predecessors.
Big Pharma buys in
Lilly isn’t the only pharma giant investing in the future of in vivo therapies, with 2025 being a standout year for high-profile drugmakers scooping up CAR-T platforms.
AstraZeneca got the ball rolling in March last year with a $1 billion acquisition of Belgian drugmaker EsoBiotec, which, like Kelonia, uses a lentiviral approach to send genetic instructions to immune cells and is also being explored in multiple myeloma.
About three months later, AbbVie picked up Capstan Therapeutics for $2.1 billion not with cancer targets in mind, but autoimmune diseases.
Two more deals rounded out the year, with Kite dropping $350 million for Interius BioTherapeutics and Bristol Myers Squibb acquiring Orbital Therapeutics for $1.5 billion, granting access to an RNA-based platform.
The shift to an influx of in vivo deals demonstrates Big Pharma’s appetite for the more versatile technology. And this latest acquisition from Lilly, setting a new high water mark for deal value in the space, further solidifies the potential these drugmakers see in more accessible therapies.
Meanwhile, Kelonia is considered a leader in the in vivo space, demonstrating phase 1 results in which all four multiple myeloma patients in the small study showed minimal residual disease-negative response rate. Friedman said at the time that “the democratization of CAR-T therapies may be truly within reach.”
Kelonia picked up an investigational new drug clearance at the beginning of this year, allowing the company to expand enrollment in the ongoing early-stage trial.
