Lilly's 7 Acquisitions in 3 Months: Which Will Be the Biggest Game-Changer for the Pharma Giant?

Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) spent a lot of 2026 on a shopping spree. Riding an obesity drug windfall, the company has announced more than $25 billion in acquisitions across roughly 10 deals this year, with seven of them reported in the last three months alone.

The purchases cover areas such as sleep medicine, blood cancers, cell therapy, and vaccines. In other words, Lilly is diversifying beyond metabolic medicine. But which of the new acquisitions will be the most important for the future of the company?

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These oncology plays could be key drivers of growth over the long term

Let's start by looking at how this recent slew of acquisitions will reshape Lilly's pipeline.

Lilly acquired Kelonia Therapeutics to deepen its position in the oncology cell therapy space, which it first entered in February with the $2.4 billion purchase of Orna Therapeutics. Per the terms of the Kelonia deal, signed in mid-April, Lilly will pay $3.3 billion upfront sometime in the second half of this year, and up to $7 billion, including milestone payments. Kelonia's multiple myeloma candidate is still in phase 1, but the biotech's technology makes it (potentially) highly valuable.

Standard chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy requires harvesting a patient's immune cells, reengineering them in a clinical lab, then reinfusing them for treatment, which is a slow, costly, difficult-to-scale, and error-prone process that caps patient volume. Kelonia's candidate instead reprograms those T-cells inside the body with a single infusion, which would mark an incredible advancement in the CAR-T field if it's eventually approved.

Separately, in mid-April, Lilly bought CrossBridge Bio for up to $300 million, including an upfront payment and a development milestone, picking up its dual-payload antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) platform. CrossBridge doesn't have any clinical-stage candidates yet, but the point of buying it is to gain access to its ADC platform, which could be used to develop next-generation medicines across a range of indications.

So, by acquiring these biotechs, Lilly now has multiple new therapy platforms for developing cancer drugs in its portfolio, which could unlock significant growth over the coming decade.

Another key acquisition announcement, this time for Ajax Therapeutics, came in late April. Ajax is developing a type II JAK2 (Janus kinase 2) inhibitor in phase 1 trials that's intended for a rare bone-marrow cancer called myelofibrosis in patients who failed to sufficiently improve on first-line drugs. Lilly will pay up to $2.3 billion in cash and milestones, and, in exchange, it'll deepen the company's relatively thin position in blood cancers, precisely at the same time it'll be gaining access to new technologies (and data from the trials), which it might be able to use in synergy with its other oncology programs.

This company isn't snoozing on sleep medicine

The deal most likely to reshape Lilly's outlook is also its biggest outlay: Centessa Pharmaceuticals, announced in late March for $6.3 billion in cash upfront, with up to an additional $1.5 billion in milestones, for a total potential value of $7.8 billion.

Centessa's lead candidate, cleminorexton, is in phase 2a trials and is an oral orexin 2 receptor (OX2R) agonist being investigated to treat two types of narcolepsy and idiopathic hypersomnia (excessive sleepiness without a known cause). That single purchase thus hands Lilly a trio of mid-stage programs with room to expand, and it isn't a segment or target that's represented anywhere else in its pipeline. This is the game-changer of the bunch because it brings the most clinically advanced asset and an entirely new franchise to Lilly's portfolio in one move.

So, in sum, with these new biotech purchases, Lilly is entering a new phase of its existence. In just a handful of years, it'll have a far larger pipeline footprint, with a substantial share outside its traditional wheelhouse of metabolic medicine. In the long run, that'll make it a more resilient business, and, while there are sure to be stumbles along the way, it'll likely support the bull case for buying its stock for years to come.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Centessa Pharmaceuticals Plc and Eli Lilly. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.