Eli Lilly To Buy Cancer Treatment Company Loxo Oncology For $8 Billion In Cash

Eli Lilly and Company and Loxo Oncology, Inc. announced a definitive agreement for Lilly to acquire Loxo Oncology for $235 per share in cash, or approximately $8 billion.

Loxo Oncology is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of highly selective medicines for patients with genomically defined cancers.

The acquisition would be the largest and latest in a series of transactions Lilly has conducted to broaden its cancer treatment efforts with externally sourced opportunities for first-in-class and best-in-class therapies.

Loxo Oncology is developing a pipeline of targeted medicines focused on cancers that are uniquely dependent on single gene abnormalities that can be detected by genomic testing.  For patients with cancers that harbor these genomic alterations, a targeted medicine could have the potential to treat the cancer with dramatic effect.