Eli Lilly just spent $7 billion on cancer. Here's what it means for LLY stock in 2026. Last updated Apr 25, 2026 Key stats for Eli Lilly stock. * Current Price: $883.96 * Street Target: ~$1,211 * Target Price (Mid): ~$1,744 * Potential Total Return: ~97% * Annualized IRR: ~16% / year * Earnings Reaction: -7.79% (February 4, 2026) What Happened? Eli Lilly (LLY) stock has spent most of 2026 confusing its own shareholders. The company delivered a strong Q4 2025 earnings beat, won FDA approval for Foundayo (its new oral weight-loss pill), and this week announced a $7 billion acquisition in cancer therapy. The stock is still down roughly 15% year-to-date, near $884. Bulls say a company that grew revenue 44.7% in 2025 and guided to $80-$83 billion for 2026 does not stay at this price for long. Bears say the market is asking harder questions about structural GLP-1 pricing pressure and whether this level of deal-making signals a growth ceiling rather than confidence. The most urgent news is Lilly's April 20 agreement to acquire Kelonia Therapeutics for up to $7 billion. Kelonia is developing an in vivo CAR-T therapy, meaning a cancer treatment that reprograms a patient's T-cells directly inside the body. This eliminates the costly, weeks-long lab process that current CAR-T treatments require, which limits access to large academic medical centers. Kelonia's lead program, KLN-1010, targets multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and showed a 100% minimal residual disease-negative response rate in its first four evaluable patients, data presented at the 2025 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting. The deal includes $3.25 billion upfront and up to $3.75 billion in milestones, with closing expected in the second half of 2026. Jacob Van Naarden, Lilly's executive vice president and president of Lilly Oncology, put the rationale plainly in the official press release: "Significant manufacturing, safety, and access barriers mean that only a fraction of eligible patients actually receive" current CAR-T therapies, and "Kelonia's in vivo platform has the potential to change that by delivering rapid, durable responses in a far simpler, off-the-shelf format." The market was unimpressed, sending shares down roughly 1% on announcement day and another 2.5% the following session. Kelonia is Lilly's fourth biotech acquisition of 2026. It bought Ventyx Biosciences for $1.2 billion in January, agreed to buy Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4 billion in February, and committed up to $7.8 billion for Centessa Pharmaceuticals and its sleep medicine pipeline in March. The pattern is deliberate: Lilly is converting its GLP-1 cash flows into a diversified pipeline before the obesity market matures. Is Eli Lilly Undervalued Today? The business itself is performing well. LTM revenue hit $65.2 billion, up 44.7% year-over-year, with an LTM EBIT margin of 45.6% and an 83% gross margin. Combined 2025 sales of Mounjaro and Zepbound exceeded $36.5 billion, making tirzepatide the world's best-selling drug for the year. That is the foundation. The stock is down anyway, and there are two specific reasons why. First, pricing: Lilly's own 2026 guidance bakes in a low-to-mid-teens percentage decline in global drug pricing, driven by its agreement with the U.S. government on Medicare and Medicaid obesity drug access. That is structural, not temporary. Second, Foundayo's early launch data is underwhelming. According to IQVIA data cited by RBC Capital Markets, Lilly's new oral obesity pill recorded just 3,707 prescriptions in its second week on the market. Lilly pre-built $1.5 billion in inventory to avoid the supply shortages that slowed its injectable rollouts, so supply is not the constraint. Demand velocity is. The bull case rests on the free cash flow picture. FCF is forecast to nearly triple from $8.97 billion in 2025 to around $22.2 billion in 2026, as the heavy manufacturing investment cycle begins to normalize. That cash generation underwrites the acquisitions and is what investors who are buying the stock today are betting on. At $884, Lilly trades at 25.52x NTM P/E and 20.77x NTM EV/EBITDA, a meaningful premium to peers. Merck trades at 14.57x NTM EV/EBITDA and 21.90x NTM P/E. Novo Nordisk, Lilly's most direct GLP-1 competitor, trades at just 9.20x NTM EV/EBITDA and 12.52x NTM P/E after issuing its own revenue guidance cut for 2026. Lilly's premium needs Foundayo to scale and its pipeline to deliver. If both happen, it looks cheap. If neither does, the multiple has room to compress further. TIKR Advanced Model Analysis. * Current Price: $883.96 * Target Price (Mid): ~$1,744 * Potential Total Return: ~97% * Annualized IRR: ~16% / year The TIKR mid-case model projects a revenue CAGR of around 12% through 2030 and a net income margin expanding to around 42%. The primary revenue drivers are sustained GLP-1 volume growth from Mounjaro and Zepbound, supported by Medicare coverage expansion, and Foundayo's ramp into the broader oral obesity market. The margin driver is operating leverage as manufacturing capacity scales without proportional cost growth. On those assumptions, LLY reaches around $1,744 by December 31, 2030, a roughly 97% total return and an annualized return of around 16% per year over 4.7 years. The low case, with revenue growing closer to 10% annually, still prices the stock above today's level by 2030. The downside scenario is multiple compressions, not a business collapse. The high case, around 13% revenue CAGR and 44% net income margins, offers substantially more. The main risk the model does not fully capture is the pharmaceutical tariff policy. Import duties on drugs manufactured outside the U.S. would pressure the margin assumptions underpinning the mid-case. Any escalation would likely suppress the valuation multiples investors are willing to pay before it shows up in earnings. Across 18 Buys, 6 Outperforms, 6 Holds, and 1 Sell, the Street's mean price target is ~$1,211, roughly 37% above today's price on a 12-month horizon. The TIKR mid-case runs further out and targets more, but both point in the same direction. Conclusion. Watch Foundayo's initial revenue contribution at the April 30 Q1 2026 earnings call. A strong debut signals that the muted early prescription data understates true demand, and would push 2026 estimates higher. A weak figure validates the bear case that oral GLP-1 adoption is slower than the injectable ramp. Lilly is down roughly 22% from its 52-week high, its free cash flow is set to nearly triple this year, and it now holds one of the most active oncology pipelines in large-cap pharma. Whether investors get rewarded comes down to whether Foundayo and the broader deal strategy prove out over the next few quarters. Should You Invest in Eli Lilly? The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question. Pull up Eli Lilly, and you'll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down. 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Table of Contents * What Happened? * Is Eli Lilly Undervalued Today? * TIKR Advanced Model Analysis * Conclusion * Should You Invest in Eli Lilly? * Looking for New Opportunities? * Disclaimer: Earnings Updates Stock Reviews Join thousands of investors worldwide who use TIKR to supercharge their investment analysis.

Eli Lilly doubles down on in vivo with $7bn Kelonia buyout. Lilly now has a lentiviral and LNP-based platform for in vivo delivery under its belt, which analyst Jack Cuthbertson says will give the company a broader chance for success. Eli Lilly has agreed to acquire Massachusetts-based gene therapy developer, Kelonia Therapeutics, for up to $7bn - marking the pharma's second foray into the in vivo space this year. Through a $3.25bn upfront cash investment, Lilly will secure the rights to Kelonia's lentiviral-based in vivo gene therapy platform, iGPS, which is designed to prompt the body's immune cells to produce therapeutic anti-B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) CAR-Ts independently. The buyout will also see Lilly absorb Kelonia's pipeline of oncology medicines - including its single-dose, BCMA-directed in vivo multiple myeloma asset, KLN-1010, which is currently in the Phase I inMMyCAR trial (NCT07075185) for refractory disease. Alongside its focus on KLN-1010, Kelonia is working on a preclinical bispecific CAR-T therapy targeting both BCMA and CD19, as well as an asset with an undisclosed mechanism at the discovery stage. With these medicines under its wing, Lilly is also pledging up to $3.75bn in clinical, regulatory and commercial milestone payments based on their success. According to Jacob Van Naarden, executive VP and president of Lilly Oncology, Kelonia's in vivo platform could have the potential to overcome the safety, manufacturing and access hurdles associated with autologous CAR-T therapies. "The early clinical data for KLN-1010 are highly encouraging, both as a potential step forward for patients with multiple myeloma and as proof of concept for Kelonia's platform," Van Naarden said. In vivo's future in the CGT space. As in vivo therapies burst onto the scene, many experts are touting them as a way to bring down the cost and complexity of the cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing process, thus potentially lowering the barriers to global access. With several big pharma companies hedging their bets on the in vivo approach over the past year, the race to potential commercialisation is on. According to Jack Cuthbertson, senior oncology analyst at GlobalData, Lilly's Kelonia buyout could be a sign of the Indiana-based pharma covering all bases following its $2.4bn acquisition of Orna Therapeutics in February 2026. "There are currently two major types of in vivo CAR-T technologies: lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) loaded with transient expression systems as used by Orna, and lentiviral vectors with stable expression systems employed by Kelonia," Cuthbertson commented. Comparing the LNP and lentiviral approaches. At this point in time, Cuthbertson noted that it's still unclear which type of system will take the lead. "A lot of the early data shows that lentiviral systems can effectively deliver complete responses with good prognoses. However, there are some safety concerns around immune responses when high lentiviral doses are given to deliver a therapeutic effect," he said. This is evidenced by a Phase I readout from AstraZeneca's lentiviral in vivo CAR-T therapy, which uncovered some safety signals GlobalData analysts call "concerning". In the small trial, all five patients experienced adverse events rated Grade 3 or above. This prompted the study authors to suggest stricter risk stratification when running in vivo CAR-T trials in the future. When it comes to LNP-based alternatives, Cuthbertson noted that they are often more tolerable, but may not be able to deliver the sustained, complete responses that ex-vivo CAR-Ts can. In vivo therapy developers must also tackle the technical and logistical challenges around commercial viability as these therapies progress to the clinic. At the 2026 Advanced Therapies conference in London, investors stressed the importance of devising a commercial strategy for CGT products early. Cell & Gene Therapy coverage on Pharmaceutical Technology is supported by Cytiva. Editorial content is independently produced and follows the highest standards of journalistic integrity. Topic sponsors are not involved in the creation of editorial content. Free eBook. Navigating cell therapy process development. The cell therapy manufacturing sector is rapidly evolving, driven by the need to balance innovative process development with rigorous GMP standards. This eBook, brought to you by industry leaders Cytiva, explores how biotech firms can address common challenges -... By Cytiva Thematic You have a right to withdraw your consent at any time, by clicking here. Pharmaceutical Technology may still continue to send you service-related and other non-promotional communications. For more information relating to its privacy practices, Pharmaceutical Technology invite you to review its privacy policy. Give your business an edge with its leading industry insights.