Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTAlex Carchidi, The Motley FoolSat, June 20, 2026 at 5:05 PM GMT+2 5 min readEli 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?Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue »Image source: Getty Images.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.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info