Health
Eli Lilly Bets $7.8 Billion That Sleep Will Be the Next Obesity
Scooping up Centessa gives Lilly a foothold in narcolepsy and a promising new class of wakefulness drugs.
Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound is helping to solve one of the most intractable health challenges of our time: obesity. Now, the drugmaker is taking on another significant public health predicament: sleep disorders.
In a deal worth up to $7.8 billion — just shy of Lilly’s largest acquisition ever — the American drugmaker is buying Centessa Pharmaceuticals Plc, a biotech that’s developing medicines to treat narcolepsy and a variety of disorders where people have trouble staying fully alert and awake during the daytime.