Servier’s recent announcement it would acquire oncology specialist Day One Biopharmaceuticals for $2.5 billion showed that building a focused pipeline via the tried-and-true M&A playbook is still a viable growth strategy, especially for companies pushing the R&D envelope.
The deal, which would give the private French drugmaker a slew of pipeline candidates for childhood cancers, also comes with the approved drug Ojemda for difficult pediatric brain cancers.
Servier has spent the last few years building its oncology pipeline through similar deals, snagging Shire’s oncology business in 2018 for $2.4 billion and Agios Pharmaceuticals’ cancer arm in 2021 for $1.8 billion.
The latest deal fulfills the promise U.S. CEO David Lee saw in the stumbling biotech market last year. With smaller drugmakers struggling to make ends meet following the COVID-19 pandemic’s bubble, Lee realized an opportunity to “separate the really good science from the rest,” he said in a conversation with PharmaVoice in June.
“The companies that are able to unlock that value will continue to do well while others may continue to fall away,” Lee said, pointing out that a tough market makes it difficult for individual companies to retain enough runway, but helps the most innovative ones stand out.
For a company that only entered the cancer space in 2018, Servier’s own oncology business has grown quickly, particularly for treating cancers with a mutation of the enzyme IDH. While Servier has been known as a hypertension and cardiology company for decades, oncology revenue grew by more than 50% in the fiscal year 2024-2025, marking a swift transformation led by a series of M&A deals.
Day One went public in 2021 and corralled a sizable funding round, but was struggling to keep shareholders happy with its stock down 20% ahead of the Servier announcement.
Day One CEO Jeremy Bender said that Servier, by nature of advancing its own targeted therapies through the clinic, would be “the ideal home for our portfolio.”
Despite broader market ups and downs, Lee called the current era a “golden age for pharma and biotech,” and said that companies need to invest in innovation now more than ever for long-term sustainability.
Unlike many mid-sized pharmas, Servier is owned and guided by a nonprofit foundation that keeps revenue flowing back into innovation. That R&D focus has allowed Servier to build expertise where others might shy away, such as rare pediatric cancers.
“It’s one of those areas people don’t like to invest [in] usually because the business case isn’t big enough between the difficulty of the targets and the risky market,” Lee said at the time.
In a letter on the company’s website, Lee wrote that investments like Shire, Agios and now, Day One, are evidence of a successful private and nonprofit strategy, pushing toward riskier R&D programs.
“We would love to grow both organically and inorganically, so we’re going to continue to invest in our own R&D and seek out the right deals,” Lee told PharmaVoice last year.
