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Eli Lilly<\/a> will acquire biotech company Kelonia Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $7 billion, the company said Monday.<\/a><\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Johnson & Johnson’s<\/a> CAR-T treatment for multiple myeloma, Carvykti, accounted for $1.89 billion in sales last year. Gilead<\/a> recently acquired partner Arcellx and its rival to J&J’s drug, called anito-cel, for $7.8 billion.<\/p>\n Lilly’s Van Naarden called Kelonia’s data “nothing short of remarkable.” <\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n