Eli Lilly said on Tuesday that it would buy three vaccine developers in deals collectively worth up to $4 billion, a move that signals a return to an area that had not been a major focus for the company in recent years.
The three are Curevo, a Seattle-area company developing a vaccine against shingles; LimmaTech Biologics, a Swiss firm targeting staph infections; and Vaccine Company, homing in on the Epstein-Barr virus. None of the three have products on the market.
Eli Lilly last fall became health care’s first company worth $1 trillion. Flush with cash from sales of its hugely popular weight loss drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound, the company has been on a buying spree lately. This year it also acquired a series of small companies working in areas including cancer, narcolepsy, cell therapies and inflammation.
The vaccine industry has struggled under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has overseen a series of policy changes hostile to vaccine development. Sales of major vaccines have slumped, and smaller companies have said the political climate has made it harder for them to raise money and expand.
Even before Mr. Kennedy’s ascendance, some major pharmaceutical companies had made their infectious diseases divisions less of a priority, in large part because they were less profitable than other areas.
In recent years, Eli Lilly has focused on drugs for diabetes, weight loss, cancer, immune conditions and Alzheimer’s disease.
But the company, now 150 years old, has a long history in infectious diseases. In the 1950s, Eli Lilly produced the polio vaccine. In the late 1980s, the antibiotic Ceclor was the company’s best-selling product.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report Eli Lilly’s latest acquisitions.
Rebecca Robbins is a Times reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
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