Bristol-Myers Squibb to Buy Celgene for $74 Billion

The deal between the two biopharmaceutical giants will boost the purchaser’s cancer drug portfolio.

Written byCatherine Offord
| 1 min read

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Global pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb will acquire biotech company Celgene for approximately $74 billion, according to an announcement made today (January 3). The deal, which will see Bristol-Myers Squibb assimilate Celgene’s portfolio of therapies for indications in oncology, inflammation, and immunology, spells the consolidation of two of the largest makers of cancer medicines.

“We will also benefit from an expanded early- and late-stage pipeline that includes six expected near-term product launches,” Giovanni Caforio, chairman and CEO of Bristol, says in the statement.

Five of those six products come from Celgene, and all but one are related to cancer treatment. They include two CAR T-cell therapies that Celgene acquired when it bought biotech company Juno Therapeutics for $9 billion last year, a small-molecule drug for the blood cancer myelofibrosis, and a protein therapeutic being investigated in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes—a group of blood cancers—as well as in ...

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Meet the Author

  • After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.

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