Eli Lilly to acquire cancer drug maker Kelonia in deal worth up to $7B

Eli Lilly will acquire biotech company Kelonia Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $7 billion, the company said Monday.

Lilly will pay $3.25 billion upfront, and the remaining payments are contingent upon clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones, it said. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

Kelonia is developing technology to reprogram patients’ T-cells inside the body so those cells can attack cancer, called in vivo CAR-T. Current treatments require that work to be done outside the body, or ex vivo, a process that involves harvesting cells, engineering them in a lab and then reintroducing them. While logistically intensive, the procedure has been successful for blood cancers like multiple myeloma. 

“It’s an intravenously delivered therapy, one time,” Jacob Van Naarden, president of Lilly oncology and head of corporate business development, said in an interview. “It targets your body’s T-cells, transforms them into attacking the cancer in the body, and requires no preconditioning at all.”

Johnson & Johnson’s CAR-T treatment for multiple myeloma, Carvykti, accounted for $1.89 billion in sales last year. Gilead recently acquired partner Arcellx and its rival to J&J’s drug, called anito-cel, for $7.8 billion.

Lilly’s Van Naarden called Kelonia’s data “nothing short of remarkable.”

“We’re going to be a player in hematology,” he said. “It’s nice to have another medicine to go to those doctors with a medicine that can be used broadly, that isn’t relegated to academic medical centers who can do ex-vivo personalized cell therapy.”