Eli Lilly Will Buy Loxo Oncology for $8 Billion

Loxo focuses on cancer treatments based on tumor genetics, which will contribute to Lilly’s push in the cancer drug space.

Written byAshley Yeager

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Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced yesterday (January 7) that it would buy Loxo Oncology for around $8 billion.

"We’d like to grow our presence in oncology. We have a good set of medicines there but we’d like to expand that because there’s so much exciting science for patients emerging in oncology to invest in," Lilly CEO David Ricks tells CNBC.

Loxo’s cancer drugs target gene abnormalities identified during genomic testing. The company’s leading treatment, LOXO-292, homes in on changes to the RET (rearranged during transfection) kinase, which pop up in multiple tumor types, including lung and thyroid cancers. It’s earned a Breakthrough Therapy designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Another drug in the company’s portfolio is larotrectinib (Vitrakvi), which inhibits a specific receptor kinase that promotes tumors and has shown promise in treating cancers in the lung, colon, breast, and thyroid. It earned ...

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Meet the Author

Ashley Yeager
Ashley started at The Scientist in 2018. Before joining the staff, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, a writer at the Simons Foundation, and a web producer at Science News, among other positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. Ashley edits the Scientist to Watch and Profile sections of the magazine and writes news, features, and other stories for both online and print.
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