Eli Lilly: will this trillion dollar juggernaut continue to roll?

Eli Lilly's revenue grew $20.1 Bn in 2025. Its entire acquired portfolio, the accumulated output of $47.82 Bn of external capital committed since 2016, grew just by $95 Mn! Four months after Lilly's own Form 10-K told shareholders that its pending 2026 acquisitions would cost less than $3 Bn at closing, the company had announced more than $20 Bn of them. And the venture arm Lilly would need to source deals like these years in advance, it spun off, twice, and now controls neither.

Those three facts don't sit together the way a deliberate strategy should. This post follows the money across a decade: $65.18 Bn of FY2025 revenue, roughly 40 business development transactions in a single year, and every acquisition, licence and impairment I could find a disclosed dollar figure for, to work out what Lilly's capital actually believes about its own future. It is not what the press releases say.

Chapter 1: From an apothecary in Indianapolis to a trillion $ company

Colonel Eli Lilly opened a laboratory in Indianapolis in 1876. For most of the twentieth century the company grew through internal chemistry: insulin from 1923, the first commercial penicillin production during the Second World War, Prozac in 1987, Zyprexa, Cialis as well as Alimta. Structurally, the modern Lilly was shaped by three moves rather than by any large merger of equals.

The first was the creation of Elanco Products Company as an animal health division in 1954, which Lilly grew for six decades, listed in an initial public offering in 2018, and fully separated by spin-off in March 2019. The second was the ImClone acquisition in 2008 for approximately $6.5 billion, which established a biologics oncology franchise. The third, and the one that matters most for this teardown, was the acquisition of Loxo Oncology in January 2019 for roughly $8.0 billion. Loxo delivered three assets that still generate revenue or run trials today: larotrectinib (Vitrakvi), selpercatinib (Retevmo) and pirtobrutinib (Jaypirca). In November 2025, Lilly became the first healthcare company in history to reach a market capitalisation of one trillion dollars.

The FY2025 scale and the single molecule that drove it

Lilly's FY2025 revenue was $65.18 billion, an increase of 45% over the $45.04 billion reported for FY2024. The company's own revenue bridge in the FY2025 Form 10-K attributes that increase to a 50% consolidated volume gain, offset by a 6% consolidated price decline, with a 1% favourable foreign exchange contribution. In the U.S. specifically, volume rose 53% while realised prices fell 10%. Here is where the interesting part begins. In the FY2025 Form 10-K, Lilly no longer publishes a full brand by brand revenue table. It publishes exactly four lines.

Read that fourth row again. Every Lilly product other than Mounjaro, Zepbound and Verzenio, taken together, generated $22.95 billion in 2025 against $23.27 billion in 2024. That is a decline of $321 million, or 1%.

Mounjaro and Zepbound are the same molecule, tirzepatide, marketed under different brands for type 2 diabetes and for obesity. Together they booked $36.50 billion, which the 10-K itself states was 56% of total revenue. In FY2024 the same two brands booked $16.46 billion, or 36.6% of revenue.

My own arithmetic on those two disclosed figures produces the number that frames this entire post. Non tirzepatide revenue was $28.57 billion in 2024 and $28.67 billion in 2025. That is growth of 0.3%. (Author's calculation; not an official company reconciliation.) Total revenue grew by $20.14 billion. Tirzepatide grew by $20.04 billion. Everything else that Lilly sells, in aggregate, contributed $95 million of the year's growth!

Therapy area mix

Lilly reports across four therapeutic areas: cardiometabolic health, oncology, immunology and neuroscience, plus an "other" line comprising legacy products such as Cialis, Forteo and Humatrope.

Top brands by therapy area

The origin column is still the point. Lilly's two largest revenue lines, Mounjaro and Zepbound, are internally discovered, and so is Verzenio. But notice what a $1 billion threshold cannot show: Neuroscience does not appear at all, and Oncology and Immunology are each carried by exactly one brand. Kisunla, Lilly's global Alzheimer's launch, generated an author calculated $249 million in FY2025, the sum of four quarterly figures disclosed in Lilly's own earnings presentations, nowhere close to the blockbuster cutoff so far.

Portfolio position: the growth share matrix

The empty Pet quadrant is not an oversight. Every Lilly brand with enough disclosed, or reliably derivable, FY2025 revenue to plot on this chart is doing one of two things: driving growth, or declining from a position that still generates real share. Nothing in this data has settled into the sleepy, low growth, low share territory a mature Pet typically occupies. That is either evidence of genuine portfolio discipline, retiring or licensing out brands before they become dead weight, or evidence that Lilly's least interesting brands are exactly the ones it has stopped disclosing individually. Both readings are consistent with what the numbers show, and the numbers alone cannot adjudicate between them.

Financial health: 2023 to 2025

Three years, three doublings. Revenue grew 91% from FY2023 to FY2025. Net income grew 294%. EBITDA, as I have built it, grew 241%. Gross margin expanded 380 basis points, from 79% to 83%. The specific moves worth explaining. Gross margin rose 170 basis points in FY2025 alone, which Lilly attributes to favourable product mix and improved cost of production, partially offset by lower realised prices. That mix effect is tirzepatide displacing lower margin legacy products in the sales base. Net income nearly doubled in FY2025 to $20.64 billion, from $10.6 billion, driven principally by the gross margin expansion. Note also that the effective tax rate rose from 16.5% to 19.8%, which Lilly attributes to jurisdictional mix of earnings and U.S. tax law changes, and to non deductible acquired in process research and development charges in both periods.

That last clause matters. Lilly's acquired IPR&D charges are non deductible. Every dollar it expenses on an early stage external asset raises its effective tax rate. In FY2024, when acquired IPR&D was $3.280 billion, the effective tax rate was 16.5%. In Q3 2024 alone, on a quarterly basis, the effective tax rate reached 38.9% because of the Morphic charge. Buying science outside the walls carries a tax cost that buying bricks does not.

Asset impairment, restructuring and other special charges tell their own story: $67.7 million in FY2023, $861.0 million in FY2024, $484.0 million in FY2025. The FY2024 figure includes an impairment of the Vitrakvi intangible asset, an asset acquired in the $8.0 billion Loxo transaction. The FY2025 figure includes an impairment of an intangible asset acquired through POINT BioPharma, a $1.4 billion acquisition completed in October 2023.

R&D investment and Return on Research Capital

Lilly's RoRC rose from 3.76x to 4.92x across three years, a 31% improvement. On its face that is a company converting research spend into gross profit with rising efficiency. I do not read it that way, and here is the specific reason. RoRC divides this year's gross profit by last year's R&D. Tirzepatide's Phase 3 SURPASS and SURMOUNT programmes were largely funded in the 2019 to 2022 window, when Lilly's annual R&D spend ran between roughly $5.6 billion and $7.2 billion. The gross profit those trials now generate is being measured against a denominator that never paid for them. The ratio improved because the numerator exploded, not because the denominator became more productive.

Set against the external benchmark, the picture is starker still. Deloitte's fifteenth and sixteenth annual "Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation" reports put the forecast internal rate of return for the top twenty biopharmaceutical companies at 5.9% for 2024 and 7.0% for 2025, up from a record low of 1.2% in 2022. Deloitte is explicit that GLP-1 assets drive this: excluding them, the 2024 figure falls to 3.8%. In its 2025 report Deloitte notes that for the first time in sixteen years of analysis, obesity drugs have displaced oncology as the largest single contributor to pipeline value.

In other words, the industry's headline research return is being propped up by a category in which Lilly and Novo Nordisk are the two participants that matter. When an analyst compares Lilly's RoRC favourably to an industry benchmark, they are, in substantial part, comparing Lilly to itself. Meanwhile R&D expense rose 21% in FY2025 to $13.337 billion. As a share of revenue it fell from 24.4% to 20.5%. That is not a company reducing research intensity. It is a company whose revenue outran its research budget by twenty four percentage points of growth in a single year.

Chapter 2: The company that gave away its venture arm twice

Lilly is the only company of its size that has spun out its corporate venture arm not once but twice, in 2009 and in 2011, and then rebuilt a new one inside the walls under the same name. Lilly Asia Ventures, which began as a Lilly subsidiary in 2008, is now an independent firm managing approximately $4.5 billion. Lilly does not control it. What Lilly built instead is Catalyze360, four pillars that give startups capital, laboratory space, research services and artificial intelligence models, in exchange for data and proximity. Acquired in-process R&D charges went from $30 million in 2016 to $3.8 billion in 2023, a 127-fold increase in seven years, and have since declined for two consecutive years. Lilly executed roughly 40 business development transactions in 2025 and announced more than $20 billion of acquisitions in the first half of 2026.

The four modalities, and what Lilly actually does with each

Lilly is active across all four open innovation channels, inbound, outbound, coupled and platform, but the weightings are extremely lopsided, and the lopsidedness has changed direction twice in a decade.

Inbound dominates and consumes nearly all the capital. The clearest quantitative window into it is the acquired IPR&D line in Lilly's income statement: when Lilly acquires an asset with no alternative future use, the allocated cost is expensed immediately rather than capitalised.

Here is that line across a decade, drawn from successive Forms 10-K:

From $30 Mn to $3.8 Bn is a 127 fold increase across seven years. That is the shape of a company that decided, somewhere between 2016 and 2018, that it could not invent everything itself.

Then look at the last three rows. Acquired IPR&D declined in 2024 and declined again in 2025. Lilly's cash outflow tells the same story. Per the FY2025 Form 10-K statement of cash flows, purchases of in-process research and development were $3.94 Bn in 2023, $3.35 Bn in 2024 and $3.01 Bn in 2025. Cash paid for acquisitions net of cash acquired fell from $1.04 Bn to $948 Mn to $661 Mn across the same years. Add those two lines together and you get Lilly's total cash outflow on external science: $4.99 Bn in 2023, $4.29 Bn in 2024, $3.67 Bn in 2025. That is a 26% decline across three years, in the middle of the largest revenue expansion in the company's history. (Author's calculation; not an official company reconciliation.)

Outbound. Lilly's outbound activity is thin and shrinking. The clearest example is Ebglyss, which Lilly licensed out to Almirall for European dermatology, retaining royalties in the low double digits to low twenties percent and eligibility for up to $1.25 Bn of sales based milestones. In August 2017 Lilly and Shionogi jointly licensed varespladib to Ophirex for a snakebite treatment programme. In the third quarter of 2025 Lilly recognised $180.0 Mn of revenue on divesting Cialis rights in select markets outside the United States. Proceeds from the sale of product rights, per the cash flow statement, were $1.6 Bn in 2023, $601 Mn in 2024 and $218 Mn in 2025. An 86% decline in two years. Lilly is not a seller of science. It is a buyer.

Coupled. The two structurally important bilateral relationships are both old. The Boehringer Ingelheim diabetes alliance, announced 11 January 2011, produced the Jardiance family, comprising Jardiance, Glyxambi, Synjardy and Trijardy XR, and Basaglar. Lilly reports the royalties it receives on Jardiance net sales as revenue. The alliance has been repeatedly amended: a Q1 2025 amendment produced a one time $370.0 Mn benefit to Lilly, a Q4 2024 amendment produced a one time $300.0 Mn benefit, and a $200.0 Mn sales based milestone was recognised in Q3 2025. Per the Q3 2025 Form 10-Q, up to $410.0 Mn of further sales based milestones remain payable to Lilly in 2026. The second is the Innovent collaboration in China around Tyvyt (sintilimab). Beyond these, Lilly's co-development posture is unusual: it prefers to own outright.

Platform and ecosystem. This is where Lilly has done something no other large pharmaceutical company has done, and it is the subject of subsequent discussion. The density is not uniform. Between January 2016 and December 2016 there is nothing worth listing. Acquired IPR&D that year was $30.0 Mn. Between January 2026 and June 2026, six months, Lilly announced ten acquisitions and two licensing deals with a combined disclosed maximum value of approximately $27.45 Bn. That after it announced in its Form 10-K, filed on 12 February 2026 that potential amounts of future acquisitions would be less than $ 3 Bn.

The sourcing model

Lilly's external science comes from three geographies and three institutional types, and it is far more concentrated than the deal list suggests.

Academic: Lilly's anchor academic relationship is Purdue University, and it is not a normal one. Lilly's first chemist, Ernest Eberhardt, hired in 1886, was Purdue's top graduate from the then new School of Pharmacy. David Ricks, Lilly's chairman and chief executive, holds a Purdue degree in industrial management. A strategic research collaboration was formalised in 2017. The Eli Lilly and Company and Purdue University Research Alliance Center now hosts, per Purdue's own disclosure, more than 40 researchers and more than 90 graduate students working alongside Lilly scientists.

In May 2025 the two institutions announced the Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative: Lilly's planned investment of up to $250 Mn over eight years, which the joint press release describes as having "the potential to be the largest ever industry academic agreement of its kind in the United States." The earlier agreement, which had been set to expire in 2027, was extended with four new projects through 2032. The stated focus is artificial intelligence in drug discovery and processing, manufacturing, supply chain, and workforce development, across Indianapolis, West Lafayette, and Purdue's LEAP district in Lebanon, Indiana. A separate Lilly Scholars at Purdue programme provides free tuition and a guaranteed Lilly internship. I would characterise what Lilly has built at Purdue not as a research partnership but as a talent pipeline with a research programme attached. The intellectual property arrangements governing the LPRC are not publicly disclosed in the detail an outside analyst would want.

Geographic: Lilly's sourcing is overwhelmingly United States centric. Of the transactions in the milestone table with a disclosed counterparty location, the concentration is in Boston, Cambridge, San Diego, South San Francisco, New York and Houston. European counterparties appear infrequently: Mablink Biosciences in France, Seamless Therapeutics in Dresden, LimmaTech Biologics in Schlieren, Switzerland, and Centessa, incorporated in England. Asia Pacific sourcing runs almost entirely through the Innovent relationship in China and the Chugai licence in Japan.

That Chugai licence deserves attention. Orforglipron, Lilly's oral GLP-1 receptor agonist and the single most important pipeline asset the company owns, was licensed in from Chugai Pharmaceutical. Per Lilly's Form 10-Q disclosures, Chugai is eligible for up to $140 Mn in regulatory milestones, up to $250 Mn in sales based milestones, and royalties from the mid single digits to the low teens as a percentage of net sales. Lilly's next flagship product is not its own molecule.

Research type: Lilly's external sourcing skews strongly toward assets with an identified mechanism and at least an investigational new drug application filed. Very little of it is basic science. The exception is the platform layer, where Lilly buys capability rather than compounds: Kelonia's in vivo gene placement system, Orna's circular RNA and lipid nanoparticle chassis, Engage Biologics' non viral DNA delivery, CrossBridge Bio's dual payload conjugation chemistry.

The venture arm Lilly gave away, and the platform it built instead

This is the part of Lilly's open innovation story that is most inconsistently reported, so I want to be precise about the chronology. Lilly Ventures was formed in 2001 with $175 Mn of Lilly capital. It became, by the late 2000s, Indiana's second largest venture capital firm. Its investments ranged from roughly $1 Mn to $5 Mn and, per contemporaneous reporting in the Indianapolis Business Journal, none were based in Indiana. Its portfolio included Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, the molecular brain imaging company. Lilly acquired Avid in 2010.

In May 2009 Lilly spun Lilly Ventures out as an autonomous subsidiary with a fresh $200 Mn commitment, structured as Lilly Ventures Fund I LLC. The reason was compensation and returns. Lilly's corporate pay policies would not allow the venture team to take carried interest, and the team could not compete for talent. The then managing director said that the spin out would let Lilly Ventures pay its people like a venture firm. Lilly's vice president of new ventures, framed it in terms of returns: outsized financial returns were the top goal, with strategic fit a secondary priority. Two years later, the same thing happened again with the Asian arm. Lilly Asia Ventures originated in 2008 as a corporate venture subsidiary of Eli Lilly. Per LAV's own disclosure on its website, it "spun off to become an independent investment management company in 2011."

Today LAV manages approximately $4.5 Bn across offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Palo Alto. Its Fund VII closed in May 2025 at a $700 Mn hard cap. LAV had initially sought $900 Mn, reset the target to $650 Mn after discussions with limited partners, and closed above target. Its prior vintages had run $450 Mn and $750 Mn. Backers include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority alongside sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments, family offices, corporates and funds of funds.

LAV is not Lilly's money. Lilly does not control it. As of 2025, per BioSpace's survey of the most active corporate venture arms in pharmaceutical, LAV had made 220 investments with an active portfolio of 88 companies. Over the preceding five years, 78% of its deals were in Asia and 20% in the United States. Its activity peaked at 51 rounds in 2021, fell to 18 in 2024, and stood at six in the first part of 2025. Its exits include ProfoundBio, the antibody drug conjugate company Genmab acquired for $1.8 Bn in May 2024, and initial public offerings including Alector, ArriVent and Insilico.

Catalyze360 is Lilly's current answer, and it has four pillars. Lilly Ventures, the current in house global investment arm, which shares a name with the 2009 spin out and is not the same entity. Per Lilly's own description, it co-invests with syndicate partners and invests in health technology, emerging platforms and impact initiatives.

Lilly Gateway Labs is the incubator network. The first site opened in 2019. There are now four United States centres, in Boston, South San Francisco, San Diego and Philadelphia, and two international sites, in Beijing and Shanghai. The San Diego site, opened 26 September 2025, offers 82,514 square feet accommodating up to 15 companies and more than 250 employees. The Philadelphia site, announced 19 November 2025, occupies 44,000 square feet across two floors. Per Lilly's own disclosure, resident companies have collectively raised more than $3 Bn since 2019, advancing over 50 therapeutic programmes. Lilly ExploR&D, which provides research and development services from discovery through clinical proof of concept. Lilly TuneLab, which is the most economically interesting of the four and the one I would encourage every founder reading this to understand precisely.

TuneLab, NVIDIA, and the data trade

TuneLab is a federated artificial intelligence and machine learning platform. Lilly gives selected biotechnology companies access to proprietary drug discovery models trained on decades of Lilly's own experimental data. In 2025, per contemporaneous trade reporting, that access was offered at no cost. In return, participating companies contribute their own data to further train the models.

The architecture is what makes this workable. TuneLab runs on a federated learning framework built on NVIDIA FLARE. Partner data remains isolated. No participant sees another's compounds. As more companies participate, the models improve for everyone. Per Lilly's head of TuneLab, over 70 biotechnology partners had onboarded within the platform's first few months, with a stated target of 150 by the end of 2026.

Consider what Lilly receives. It receives a continuously refreshed, federated view of what dozens of well funded early stage biotechnology companies are working on, which targets they are pursuing, and which chemistry is producing signal. It receives that view before those companies raise a Series B. It holds, separately, an incubator network whose residents are typically three to four years from the clinic. I do not believe TuneLab is philanthropy. I believe it is the most sophisticated deal sourcing instrument any pharmaceutical company has ever built, and the fact that it is priced at zero is the entire point.

The compute underneath it is real. In October 2025, at NVIDIA GTC in Washington D.C., Lilly announced what it describes as the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company: a system of 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs rated at more than nine exaflops of artificial intelligence performance, the world's first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built with DGX B300 systems. It is called LillyPod. In 2026, at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, NVIDIA and Lilly announced a Co-Innovation AI Lab in South San Francisco, with the two companies investing up to $1 Bn over five years in talent, infrastructure and compute. The lab connects NVIDIA's Inception startup programme to TuneLab.

TuneLab's distribution has expanded aggressively. It has been integrated into Schrödinger's LiveDesign software (January 2026), Benchling, Revvity, Collaborative Drug Discovery's CDD Vault (May 2026), and in June 2026 Charles River Laboratories announced it would offer nonclinical testing services via TuneLab. Each integration places Lilly's models inside another company's research workflow.

Non-traditional partners

Digital health and direct to patient: LillyDirect launched in 2024. It routes patients to independent telehealth providers, then fulfils prescriptions through third party pharmacies. Telehealth partners have included Form Health, 9amHealth, and Cove, the migraine platform operated by Thirty Madison. Pharmacy fulfilment partners have included Truepill, Amazon Pharmacy, Walmart Pharmacy across more than 4,600 locations, GiftHealth and Prescryptive. Eversana Pharmacy Services handles benefit verification, savings application and prescription routing. Lilly's FY2025 Form 10-K states that sales through LillyDirect represented a growing portion of its business in 2025. The company did not disclose the figure.

The strategic content of LillyDirect is not convenience. It is that Lilly now sees demand, adherence and abandonment data that were previously held by pharmacy benefit managers and retail pharmacies. In a year when Lilly's realised United States prices fell 10% while United States volume rose 53%, owning the last mile of that transaction has obvious value.

Hospitals and health systems. Lilly does not publicly disclose data sharing agreements with named United States health systems of the kind AstraZeneca or Novartis have announced. What it discloses instead, in June 2026, is an equity investment in Abridge, an artificial intelligence company working on clinical trial recruitment.

Chapter 3: Follow the capital and the story starts falling apart

Between 2023 and 2025 Lilly's cash outflow on external science fell 26%, from $4.99 Bn to $3.67 Bn, while its capital expenditure rose 127%, from $3.45 Bn to $7.84 Bn. In 2023 Lilly spent $1.45 on external science for every dollar of capital expenditure. In 2025 it spent $0.47. Then, in six months of 2026, it announced over $20 Bn of acquisitions. Committed external capital over the period is overwhelmingly cardiometabolic and oncology by count, but the single largest cheque, $7.8 Bn for Centessa, went to sleep medicine. Lilly pays 80% of a deal's headline value up front for Phase 2 assets and roughly half for Phase 1 assets. The disclosed IPR&D charges prove it. Two acquisitions from the 2017 to 2018 window, worth a combined $2.56 Bn, have been terminated in full.

Committed external capital by therapy area

The headline reading is that oncology dominates. That reading is wrong, and the reason it is wrong is chronological rather than arithmetic. Oncology's share is carried almost entirely by one transaction, Loxo Oncology, closed in January 2019. Strip Loxo out and oncology falls to $7.98 Bn. Neuroscience's share is carried almost entirely by one transaction, Centessa, signed in March 2026. Cardiometabolic's share is carried almost entirely by one transaction, Kelonia, announced in 2026. Three cheques, seven years apart, define the shape of an entire decade of external capital. The therapy area pie is a chart of three decisions, not of a strategy.

Stage at deal close

The zero in that first row is the finding. Across ten and a half years and more than forty disclosed transactions, Lilly has not acquired a single approved, marketed product. Every other large pharmaceutical company in this series has. Lilly buys mechanisms. The distribution across the rest is instructive. Lilly signs more transactions at preclinical than at any other stage, eight, but commits the least capital per deal there. It commits the most capital per deal at Phase 2. And the two Phase 3 transactions in the entire period, CoLucid and ARMO, have both been terminated in full. I will come back to that.

What Lilly actually pays, and when

Here is a piece of arithmetic I have not seen in print. Lilly discloses, in its Form 10-K, the acquired IPR&D charge it recognises on each significant asset acquisition. That charge is the portion of the purchase price allocated to in process research and development with no alternative future use, expensed immediately. It is, functionally, the cash Lilly committed at closing for the science. The headline "up to" figure includes contingent milestones that may never be paid. Divide the one by the other and you get the fraction of a deal's advertised value that Lilly actually parts with when the ink dries.

Two Phase 2 assets, Morphic and DICE, both cost Lilly 80 cents of every headline dollar at closing. Two Phase 1 assets, Scorpion and SiteOne, cost roughly half. That is a coherent risk pricing rule and it holds across four of the five rows. The fifth row breaks it. Versanis was a Phase 2 asset, bimagrumab, and Lilly recognised only 31% of the headline value as an IPR&D charge. Which means the $1.93 Bn headline was overwhelmingly contingent. Lilly announced a $1.93 Bn acquisition and committed roughly $604 Mn.

The same pattern is visible in the 2026 transactions where the split is disclosed. Centessa, a Phase 2a asset with clinical proof of concept in narcolepsy, was $6.3 Bn upfront and $1.5 Bn in milestones: 81% upfront. Kelonia, a Phase 1 platform, was $3.25 Bn upfront and $3.75 Bn in milestones: 46% upfront. (Author's calculation from disclosed splits.) For a founder, this is the single most actionable table in the post. The upfront fraction of Lilly's cheque is a direct function of where your asset sits in the clinic. Phase 2 data buys you 80 cents on the advertised dollar. Phase 1 buys you half.

Modality preference

The 2020 column is the hinge. Before Prevail, Lilly had bought small molecules and one biologic. Prevail brought adeno associated virus gene therapy. Akouos extended it to the inner ear. POINT brought radioligand. Mablink and Emergence brought antibody drug conjugates. Verve brought base editing. Orna and Kelonia brought in vivo chimeric antigen receptor T cell delivery. Engage brought non viral DNA delivery. Curevo, LimmaTech and Vaccine Company brought vaccinology, a capability Lilly had not held since Elanco left. In the first six months of 2026, Lilly committed roughly $9.4 Bn to two in-vivo cell therapy delivery platforms, Kelonia and Orna, neither of which has a marketed product and one of which is preclinical. That is more than it committed to any single therapy area across the preceding decade excluding Loxo.

The bets that failed

Lilly does not publish a portfolio level accounting of external assets that failed. So I built one from the disclosures.

Lasmiditan was discovered at Lilly. Lilly out licensed it to CoLucid in 2005 because it had reorganised its research and no longer wanted the migraine programme. CoLucid took it into Phase 3. In January 2017 Lilly paid approximately $960 Mn to buy CoLucid, and with it the molecule it had originally invented. Lilly launched the drug as Reyvow in 2019. In November 2025 Lilly notified the FDA that it was discontinuing manufacture, citing declining sales, competition, the drug's Schedule V controlled substance classification, and its driving impairment labelling. Lilly told Neurology Today that it had approached other companies about a divestiture and that "ultimately, no partner was identified to assume responsibility for the product."

Lilly discovered the molecule, gave it away, bought it back for $960 Mn, launched it, could not sell it, and could not give it away a second time. Combine that with pegilodecakin. Lilly's only two Phase 3 acquisitions in the ten and a half year window, ARMO in 2018 and CoLucid in 2017, together cost approximately $2.56 Bn and both ended in complete programme termination. Since 2019, Lilly has not acquired a single Phase 3 asset. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I think it is the most important thing Lilly's deal record teaches. The company learned, expensively, that buying late stage clinical risk is a bad trade, and it has spent every year since moving earlier.

The capital reversal

This is the finding I did not expect and cannot explain away. Between FY2023 and FY2025, while revenue grew 91% and operating cash flow grew 297%, Lilly's cash outflow on external science fell 26%. Its capital expenditure rose 127%. The ratio of external innovation spend to capital expenditure went from 1.45x to 0.47x. External innovation consumed 118% of operating cash flow in 2023, and 22% in 2025. And the acquired IPR&D charge Lilly recognised per dollar of internal R&D expense fell from 41 cents to 22 cents.

A reader in early February 2026, holding Lilly's Form 10-K, would have concluded that this was a company deliberately and progressively deprioritising external science in favour of manufacturing capacity. The 10-K said pending acquisitions would cost less than $3 Bn at closing. Within four months Lilly had announced ten acquisitions worth over $20 Bn.

Chapter 4: The grid that says Lilly is buying everything except what it needs

Mapped onto a stage versus strategic distance grid, Lilly's external portfolio is dense in the preclinical and Phase 1 rows and empty at the top. There is not a single Commercial or Approved cell occupied anywhere across the grid. The Core column is the emptiest column on the grid. Lilly has spent almost nothing acquiring assets in the therapy area that generates 74% of its revenue. The heaviest concentration of committed capital sits in the Phase 1 row of the Expansionary column: $9.4 Bn for two in vivo cell therapy delivery platforms. The strategic challenge is not a portfolio gap. It is a timing gap between when tirzepatide's exclusivity begins to erode and when a preclinical delivery platform can plausibly ship.

The first thing that I observe from this grid is that Lilly's external portfolio is a preclinical portfolio wearing a Big Pharma balance sheet. Rows 4 and 5, Phase 1 and Preclinical, contain 20 of the 28 placed transactions. Rows 1 and 2, Commercial and Phase 3, contain two, and both of those are dead. The second thing is the Core column. It contains four transactions across ten and a half years: Versanis at Phase 2 for $1.93 Bn, Scorpion at Phase 1 for $2.5 Bn, and Nimbus and Protomer at preclinical. That is roughly $5.73 Bn of disclosed committed capital, out of a total across the grid of approximately $47.82 Bn, or 12%. By my calculation, cardiometabolic health generated roughly 74% of Lilly's FY2025 revenue. Lilly has committed only 12% of its external capital to defending it.

There could be a counterargument to this. Lilly does not need to buy cardiometabolic assets because it invented tirzepatide, it is running orforglipron and retatrutide in Phase 3, and its cardiometabolic problem is a manufacturing problem rather than a science problem. That is precisely what the capital expenditure line in Chapter 3 says: property and equipment purchases of $7.84 Bn in 2025, up 127% from 2023. I accept that reading up to a point, and then something seems amiss. Lilly's next flagship cardiometabolic asset, orforglipron, is licensed in from Chugai. Its follow on, retatrutide, is internal. And its defence of the obesity franchise against future incretin competition runs through Versanis, a Phase 2 monoclonal antibody for muscle preservation on which Lilly committed $604 Mn against a $1.93 Bn headline, and Nimbus, a preclinical oral obesity licence. The company that dominates obesity has committed less external capital to obesity than it has to two preclinical cell therapy delivery platforms.

The heaviest cell

When I look at Row 4, Phase 1 assets in a new modality applied to an existing therapy area. Verve at $1.3 Bn, Kelonia at $7 Bn, LimmaTech at $0.78 Bn. Total $9.08 Bn. Add Orna sitting in Row 5 Expansionary, and Lilly has committed $9.4 Bn to in vivo cell therapy delivery across two companies, Kelonia and Orna, neither of which has an approved product, one of which is at Phase 1 and one of which is preclinical. That is more committed capital than Lilly has placed in oncology across the same period excluding Loxo Oncology. It is more than it has placed in immunology in total. It is roughly 20% of the entire grid.

The logic seems coherent. Chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy works and is unusable at scale because it requires extracting a patient's cells, engineering them in a facility, and reinfusing them. If a lipid nanoparticle or a lentiviral vector can generate the same cells inside the patient, the addressable population expands from thousands to millions, and autoimmune disease becomes a cell therapy market. Kelonia's KLN-1010 is a Phase 1 anti BCMA in vivo CAR-T in relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. Orna's chassis is circular RNA plus lipid nanoparticle, targeting CD19 for B cell autoimmune disease. If that works, the prize is enormous and Lilly owns the delivery layer.

Where the challenge actually lies

The standard analysis says Lilly's problem is concentration: 56% of revenue in one molecule, therefore Lilly must diversify, therefore the acquisition spree is rational diversification. That analysis is not wrong but it is shallow, because it does not ask when. Lilly's cardiometabolic exclusivity does not expire tomorrow. Its FY2025 Form 10-K details patent and data exclusivity across major products with key expiries stretching into the 2030s and 2040s. Tirzepatide is not the near term problem. The near term problem is already visible in the numbers I set out in Chapter 1, and it has nothing to do with patents.

In FY2025, United States realised prices fell 10% while United States volume rose 53%. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, Jardiance was among the first ten drugs selected for Medicare price negotiation, effective 2026, at a government set price representing a 66% discount to its 2023 list price for a 30-day supply. In January 2026 Trulicity and Verzenio were selected, effective 2028. Under the November 2025 agreement with the United States government, Medicare beneficiaries gain access to discounted Lilly obesity medicines by July 2026. Lilly's own 2026 guidance commentary anticipates a global pricing decline in the low to mid teens. Lilly's observes that the nine year timeline to set prices for medicines approved under a new drug application "reduces the attractiveness of investment in small molecule innovation." Orforglipron is a small molecule.

So the challenge is this. Lilly's revenue base is 74% cardiometabolic. That base is entering a period of legislated and negotiated price compression, beginning in 2026 and deepening through 2028. Lilly's answer, per the grid, is $9.4 Bn of preclinical and Phase 1 cell therapy delivery platforms, $7.8 Bn of Phase 2a orexin biology for narcolepsy, and $3.83 Bn of vaccine capability it had not held in decades. Not one of those assets will generate revenue in early 2030s in my view. Look again at Row 1 and Row 2 of the grid. They are empty. Lilly has bought nothing that will sell in the window during which its base is under pressure. Its external portfolio is built for the decade after the problem, not the decade of the problem.

There is a version of this where that is exactly right. Lilly's cash generation is enormous, its operating cash flow reached $16.81 Bn in 2025, and a company that can absorb a low to mid teens price decline without stress should absolutely spend its capital on 2032 rather than on 2028. That is the disciplined answer and I think it is probably going to be Lilly's answer. But there is another reading, and the Reyvow story is what makes me hold it. In 2005 Lilly out licensed a migraine molecule because it had reorganised its research priorities. In 2017 it paid $960 Mn to reacquire it. In 2025 it discontinued manufacture and could not find a buyer. That is a company whose portfolio conviction changed twice in twenty years, each time expensively, each time in the direction that felt correct at the moment of the decision. The grid I have drawn is a snapshot of the current conviction. Ten preclinical and Phase 1 platform bets, a $7.8 Bn cheque for a sleep drug, and an empty top row. What that grid does not show, and cannot show, is which of those bets Lilly will be paying to unwind in 2034, if at all.

Two gaps I would flag

Gap one: Lilly has no Phase 3 cardiometabolic external asset and has not acquired one. If you hold a Phase 3 asset that defends or extends the incretin franchise, particularly on body composition, cardiovascular outcomes or oral bioavailability, you are selling into a gap area held by a company with $16.8 Bn of annual operating cash flow. Make hay while the sun shines!

Gap two: Lilly has never bought a marketed product in this period. Every dollar of Lilly's acquired product revenue traces to Loxo Oncology in January 2019. If you are running a commercial stage asset and pitching to Lilly, understand that you are asking the company to do something it has not done in over a decade. Understand also, from the Reyvow story, that when Lilly could not make a commercial asset work, it could also not sell it. Once bitten, twice shy! I would tread carefully in such a pitch meeting.

Chapter 5: What Lilly's cheques say that its strategy does not

The thread running through every number in this teardown is that Lilly's external innovation spending has been consistently and precisely out of phase with its own commercial reality. When its revenue was flat, it bought aggressively. When its revenue exploded, it stopped buying and poured concrete. When it told shareholders it would spend under $3 Bn, it spent over $20 Bn. The disclosed deal values, the impairment charges, the cash flow lines and the therapy area splits do not describe a company executing a plan. They describe a company reacting, with extraordinary financial force, to what it learned last quarter. Read together rather than separately, these relationships reveal what Lilly's capital actually believes, which is not what Lilly's strategy documents say.

Finding 1: The company grew $20.1 Bn and its portfolio grew $95 Mn

Lilly's FY2025 revenue rose from $45.04 Bn to $65.18 Bn. Mounjaro and Zepbound rose from $16.47 Bn to $36.51 Bn. Subtract the second from the first in both years and non tirzepatide revenue was $28.58 Bn in 2024 and $28.67 Bn in 2025, growth of 0.3%. (Author's calculation; not an official company reconciliation.) Lilly's own Form 10-K puts the point beyond argument in a single row of its MD&A: every product outside Mounjaro, Zepbound and Verzenio fell 1%, from $23.27 Bn to $22.95 Bn.

The implication is not concentration risk, which everybody already knows. It is that Lilly's acquired portfolio, the accumulated output of $47.82 Bn of committed external capital across a decade, is currently contributing practically zero net revenue growth. Loxo Oncology's Jaypirca and Retevmo, Dermira's Ebglyss, Incyte's Olumiant, POINT's radioligand programme, Prevail's gene therapies: in aggregate, in the year Lilly grew 45%, they went backwards. The external innovation machine has produced a pipeline. It has not yet produced a second growth engine.

Four of those acquired commercial assets disclose enough revenue history to show the shape of the problem directly.

Author's compilation from Lilly's own disclosures and third-party trade press citing Lilly, principally Fierce Pharma and pharmaphorum coverage of Retevmo's and Jaypirca's competing products. Ebglyss's undisclosed years reflect a staggered approval sequence, not an absence of sales.

Finding 2: The 10-K said less than $3 Bn, four months later the number was over $20 Bn

Lilly's cash outflow on external science, defined as purchases of in process research and development plus cash paid for acquisitions net of cash acquired, was $4.99 Bn in 2023, $4.29 Bn in 2024 and $3.67 Bn in 2025, a decline of 26%. Across the same three years, purchases of property and equipment rose from $3.45 Bn to $7.84 Bn, an increase of 127%. The ratio of external innovation to capital expenditure inverted from 1.45x to 0.47x, and external innovation fell from 118% of operating cash flow to 22%. (Author's calculation; not an official company reconciliation.) On 12 February 2026 the FY2025 Form 10-K stated that potential amounts payable at closing for Lilly's pending 2026 acquisitions "would be less than $3 Bn." By late May 2026, announced acquisitions exceeded $20 Bn across ten targets, with an eleventh and twelfth transaction following in June.

The concrete implication: the three year deceleration in Lilly's external spending was not a strategy. It was probably a pause. Lilly spent 2023 through 2025 building factories because it could not physically make enough tirzepatide, and it deferred everything else. The moment supply stabilised, the deferred spending arrived at once, at an average of $2.5 Bn per acquisition against a 2025 average of roughly $1.6 Bn. Anyone who read the declining IPR&D line as evidence of capital discipline read a queue as a decision.

Finding 3: A 4.92x research return that measures a five year old budget

Lilly's Return on Research Capital, gross profit divided by prior year research and development expense, rose from 3.76x in 2023 to 3.93x in 2024 to 4.92x in 2025. Over the same period R&D expense rose 43% in dollars, from $9.31 Bn to $13.34 Bn, while falling from 27.3% to 20.5% of revenue. Here is what the ratio cannot see. The FY2025 numerator, gross profit of $54.13 Bn, is 83% driven by tirzepatide by revenue mix, and tirzepatide's registrational programmes were funded when Lilly's annual R&D budget ran between roughly $5.6 Bn and $7.2 Bn. The FY2025 denominator is FY2024's $10.99 Bn, which paid for orforglipron, retatrutide, and thirty six active Phase 3 programmes that have generated no gross profit at all.

Deloitte's sixteenth annual "Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation" report puts the top twenty biopharmaceutical forecast internal rate of return at 7.0% for 2025, up from 5.9% in 2024 and a record low of 1.2% in 2022, and states plainly that GLP-1 assets drive the recovery. Excluding them, the 2024 figure falls to 3.8%. For the first time in sixteen years of that analysis, obesity has displaced oncology as the largest contributor to pipeline value across the entire cohort. The implication is uncomfortable and specific. When an analyst benchmarks Lilly's rising research return against a rising industry return, both series are being driven by the same two molecules at two companies. Lilly is not outperforming the industry benchmark. Lilly, together with Novo Nordisk, is a material portion of the industry benchmark. The comparison is close to circular, and it flatters a company whose ratio improved because its numerator ran away, not because its denominator got smarter.

Finding 4: Lilly paid 80 cents on the dollar for Phase 2, 31 cents for Versanis, and $7.8 Bn for a therapy area that shrank

The acquired IPR&D charge Lilly discloses on each significant asset acquisition is the portion of consideration allocated to science with no alternative future use and expensed at closing. Divided by the deal's headline maximum, it reveals what Lilly actually committed. Morphic, Phase 2, $2.55 Bn charge against a $3.2 Bn headline: 80%. DICE, Phase 2, $1.92 Bn against roughly $2.4 Bn: 80%. Scorpion, Phase 1, $1.41 Bn against $2.5 Bn: 56%. SiteOne, Phase 1, $494 Mn against $1 Bn: 49%. (Author's calculation from disclosed charges; not an official company reconciliation.) Four rows, one rule: clinical proof of concept roughly doubles the fraction of headline value Lilly pays at signing. The rule holds again in 2026, where Centessa's Phase 2a orexin asset carried $6.3 Bn of its $7.8 Bn headline as upfront, 81%, while Kelonia's Phase 1 platform carried $3.25 Bn of $7 Bn, 46%.

Then Versanis breaks it. Bimagrumab was a Phase 2 asset. Lilly announced a headline of up to $1.93 Bn and recognised an acquired IPR&D charge of $604 Mn: 31%. Lilly bought the single most important defensive asset for its obesity franchise, the antibody meant to preserve muscle mass while incretins strip fat, and structured it so that two thirds of the advertised price was contingent. Muscle wasting and myostatin pathway therapeutics have a rough clinical history; multiple programs in this space have failed or underdelivered before. Lilly's evaluators may have priced in exactly that risk on this specific asset.

Set that against the Centessa cheque. In the nine months to September 2025, Lilly's neuroscience revenue fell 13.8%, from $1.08 Bn to $931.8 Mn, in the year it launched Kisunla globally for Alzheimer's disease. It is the only therapy area in Lilly's portfolio that shrank. Six months later Lilly committed $6.3 Bn of upfront cash, 81% of a $7.8 Bn headline, to an asset in Neuroscience. Markets analysts have called Lilly's absence from sleep wake disorders a "blind spot," and Takeda had a competing orexin agonist, oveporexton, awaiting an FDA decision in narcolepsy type 1 in the same quarter Centessa's acquisition closed. Lilly's own neuroscience president described the deal as pursuing orexin biology "at the speed and scale it deserves," language that reads as competitive urgency rather than as a defensive hedge against a shrinking segment. Whether that urgency is well founded is not something this dataset can settle.

Finding 5: A company that sold $1.6 Bn of product rights in 2023 sold $218 Mn in 2025, and could not give Reyvow away

Proceeds from the sale of product rights, per Lilly's consolidated statements of cash flows, were $1.6 Bn in 2023, $601 Mn in 2024 and $218 Mn in 2025: a decline of 86% in two years. Over the same window, marketable equity securities on Lilly's balance sheet fell from $485.5 Mn at 31 December 2024 to $319.7 Mn at 30 September 2025, down 34%, while $878 Mn of unfunded commitments to third party venture capital funds sat outstanding, payable over up to ten years.

Lilly is not an outbound innovator and the trend is accelerating in the wrong direction. It spun Lilly Ventures out in 2009 and Lilly Asia Ventures out in 2011, releasing an entity that today manages approximately $4.5 Bn. It now invests as a limited partner in other people's funds rather than as a general partner in its own. The terminal expression of this is Reyvow. Lasmiditan was discovered inside Lilly. Lilly out licensed it to CoLucid in 2005. Lilly bought CoLucid back in January 2017 for approximately $960 Mn. Lilly launched the drug in 2019, discontinued manufacture in November 2025, and stated that it had approached other companies about divestiture and that no partner was identified to assume responsibility for the product.

Both of Lilly's Phase 3 acquisitions in this entire period, CoLucid at $960 Mn and ARMO at approximately $1.6 Bn, ended in complete programme termination. Combined consideration, roughly $2.56 Bn. Lilly has not acquired a Phase 3 asset since 2018, and it has never in this period acquired a marketed one. The implication is that Lilly is probably struggling to put up a functioning mechanism for exiting a bad asset. It cannot sell the ones that work poorly, and it cannot license out the ones it does not want. When an external asset fails, it is impaired, and when a commercial asset fails, manufacturing simply stops. That is not a portfolio management capability. It is a one way valve.

So what?

Lilly's capital decisions reveal a company that has started buying the machinery that decides which science will work. Consider what the money actually did. Between 2016 and 2019, Lilly bought two Phase 3 molecules for $2.56 Bn and lost both. Since 2019 it has bought no Phase 3 asset at all. What it has bought instead, at an accelerating rate and with rising cheque sizes, are delivery systems: adeno associated virus vectors from Prevail and Akouos and Adverum, base editing from Verve, radioligand chemistry from POINT, conjugation chemistry from Mablink and Emergence and CrossBridge, non viral DNA delivery from Engage, and $9.4 Bn across Kelonia and Orna for two ways of manufacturing chimeric antigen receptor T cells inside a living patient. Not one of those is a drug. Every one of them is a method for making drugs.

The same logic explains TuneLab, which is the piece nobody prices correctly. Lilly gives its proprietary discovery models to more than seventy biotechnology companies at no charge, running on federated infrastructure so that no participant's compounds are exposed, and takes their training data in return. It houses their scientists in six Gateway Labs sites whose residents have collectively raised over $3 Bn, targeting them, in its own portfolio head's words, three or four years before they enter the clinic. It has embedded those models inside Schrödinger, Benchling, Revvity, CDD Vault and Charles River. And it has committed up to $1 Bn over five years with NVIDIA and built a nine exaflop supercomputer to train the next generation. That is not a research collaboration. It is a company converting the one asset it holds that no competitor can replicate, a hundred and fifty years of proprietary experimental failure, into a permanent, priced at zero window onto everyone else's discovery pipeline before anyone else can see it.

The bet, then, is this. Lilly is not wagering that windfall gains of tirzepatide last, and it is not wagering that any particular acquired molecule works. It is wagering that in a decade where the industry's returns are propped up by two GLP-1 molecules, where the average cost per asset has risen from $2.12 Bn to $2.67 Bn, and where 9% of pipeline assets are forecast to deliver 70% of pipeline sales, the durable advantage does not belong to whoever owns the right compound. It belongs to whoever sees every compound first, owns the platform that delivers it, and has $16.8 Bn of annual operating cash flow to buy it the moment the data reads out.

Every number in this teardown supports that reading. The zero in the Commercial row of the grid is not an oversight; it is a company declining to pay for certainty it does not need. The 80% upfront on Morphic and DICE against 49% on SiteOne is not negotiating skill; it is a price list for clinical evidence. The 26% three year decline in external spending against a 127% rise in capital expenditure was not discipline; it was a company diverting every available dollar to the one bottleneck, tirzepatide supply, that no amount of external science could solve. And the $20 Bn that arrived within four months of a filing promising less than $3 Bn is not a change of mind. It is a queue of cheques clearing.

What Lilly cannot buy, and what none of this addresses, is time. Its cardiometabolic base, roughly 74% of revenue, faces a low to mid teens global pricing decline beginning in 2026, Medicare negotiation on Trulicity and Verzenio effective 2028, and a Jardiance price already set at a 66% discount to its 2023 list. Against that, the grid offers a Phase 1 anti BCMA in vivo cell therapy, a preclinical circular RNA chassis, a Phase 2a orexin agonist and three vaccine companies. Every one of them is an early to mid 203o's asset. Lilly has bought the decade after the problem, and has it bought it well? Only the time will tell.

Methodology and Disclaimer

This is a personal analytical perspective on Eli Lilly and Company's external innovation strategy based exclusively on publicly available information, comprising Securities and Exchange Commission filings, press releases, competitor statements and investor disclosures, current as of July 2026. This is NOT financial, investment, legal, or strategic advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell, or invest in any company, security, or asset. Before making any decisions, readers must consult qualified financial advisors, investment professionals, and legal counsels.

Financial figures are presented in dollars as reported by the company. Where a total has been decomposed, reconciled across years, or used to compute a derived ratio, the resulting figure is explicitly identified as the author's calculation and is not an official company reconciliation. EBITDA has been constructed as net income plus net interest expense plus income tax expense plus depreciation and amortisation plus asset impairment, restructuring and other special charges. Return on Research Capital has been calculated as gross profit of the current year divided by research and development expense of the prior year. Committed external capital has been defined as upfront payment plus disclosed maximum milestone payments; transactions with no disclosed value have been excluded from capital analyses and retained in deal count analyses. Strategic distance classifications in the complementarity grid are the author's judgement.

While I have cross checked sources and taken care to ensure accuracy, errors and omissions are possible. The onus of final verification lies entirely with the reader. I assume no liability for any losses, damages, or consequences resulting from reliance on this content. Drug development is inherently uncertain; all forward looking statements about pipeline progression, market potential, or strategic outcomes are subject to significant risk and may not materialize. I have no financial interest in, affiliation with, or endorsement relationship with Eli Lilly and Company or any entities mentioned herein.

Feedback, corrections, and alternative perspectives are welcome. If you would like to collaborate or contribute or even borrow some analytical piece from this post, write to info@kletthamerinsights.com.

Sources used in this blog

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47. Fierce Biotech. "Lilly, Nvidia tag on partnership with new AI co-innovation lab, $1B investment." January 12, 2026. Available at: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/lilly-nvidia-tag-partnership-new-ai-co-innovation-lab-1b-investment
48. Drug Discovery Trends. "Lilly and NVIDIA unveil $1B co-innovation lab in SF." January 2026. Available at: https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/lilly-and-nvidia-unveil-1b-co-innovation-lab-in-sf/
49. Eli Lilly and Company and Purdue University. "Lilly plans to expand Purdue University collaboration with up to a $250 Mn investment to accelerate pharmaceutical innovation." Press release, May 9, 2025. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-plans-expand-purdue-university-collaboration-250-million
50. Purdue University Office of Industry Partnerships. "Lilly plans to expand Purdue University collaboration." May 9, 2025. Available at: https://www.purdue.edu/president/industry-partners/lilly-plans-to-expand-purdue-university-collaboration-with-up-to-a-250-million-investment-to-accelerate-pharmaceutical-innovation/
51. Open Campus. "Eli Lilly, Purdue announce $250 Mn research collaboration." May 12, 2025. Available at: https://www.opencampus.org/2025/05/09/eli-lilly-purdue-announce-250m-research-collaboration/
52. Eli Lilly and Company and Purdue University Research Alliance Center. Available at: https://lprc.purdue.edu/
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54. Eli Lilly and Company. "Lilly's Social Impact Venture Capital Portfolio Poised to Grow to $300 Million with New $50 Million Allocation." Press release, May 2023. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lillys-social-impact-venture-capital-portfolio-poised-grow-300
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56. CNBC. "Eli Lilly taps Amazon Pharmacy to help deliver weight loss drug Zepbound, other medicines to patients." March 13, 2024. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/eli-lilly-taps-amazon-pharmacy-to-help-deliver-zepbound-other-drugs.html
57. Fierce Healthcare. "Eli Lilly partners with Amazon Pharmacy for home delivery of its weight loss, diabetes and migraine drugs." March 13, 2024. Available at: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/eli-lilly-partners-amazon-pharmacy-home-delivery-its-weight-loss-drugs
58. Eli Lilly and Company. "Public Policy Engagement and Political Participation." Corporate website. Available at: https://www.lilly.com/about/our-views/public-policy/political-participation
59. Lilly Grant Office. "Transparency." Available at: https://grantoffice.lilly.com/transparency
60. Lilly Grant Office. Grant Registry by Organizational Name, reporting period January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2024. Available at: https://grantoffice.lilly.com/assets/pdf/grant-registry-2024.pdf
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62. Deloitte. "Weight loss drugs boom drives pharma R&D returns, but industry could face 'bubble' effect." Press release, 2026. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/weight-loss-drugs-boom-drives-pharma-r-and-d-returns.html
63. Deloitte. "Global pharma R&D returns rise as GLP-1 drugs help drive forecast growth." Press release, March 2025. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/global-pharma-rd-returns-rise-as-one-glp-drugs-help-drive-forecast-growth.html
64. Deloitte. "Be brave, be bold: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation." Thoughts from the Centre, April 2025. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/blogs/thoughts-from-the-centre/be-brave-be-bold-measuring-the-return-from-pharmaceutical-innovation.html
65. Deloitte. "Global pharma companies' return on R&D investment increases after record low." Press release, April 2024. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/global-pharma-companies-return-on-rd-investment-increases-after-record-low.html
66. Fierce Biotech. "Drug development cost pharma $2.2B per asset in 2024 as GLP-1s drive financial return: Deloitte." March 25, 2025. Available at: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/drug-development-cost-pharma-22b-asset-2024-plus-how-glp-1s-impact-roi-deloitte
67. Contract Pharma. "Lilly: Top Company Profile." Available at: https://www.contractpharma.com/top-company-profile/lilly/
68. Clinical Trials Arena. "Lilly's pegilodecakin fails in Phase III pancreatic cancer trial." Available at: https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/pegilodecakin-fails-pancreatic-cancer-trial/
69. Fierce Biotech. "After phase 3 bust, Lilly cans pancreatic cancer program for Armo buyout drug." October 2019. Available at: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/after-phase-3-bust-lilly-bids-armo-buyout-drug-adieu
70. PMLiVE. "Lilly picks up gene therapy programme in $1bn Prevail Therapeutics acquisition deal." Available at: https://pmlive.com/pharma_news/lilly_scores_gene_therapy_programme_in_1bn_prevail_therapeutics_acquisition_deal_1360189/
71. Life Science Daily News. "LillyPod Drug Discovery: Lilly's NVIDIA Supercomputer Explained." May 2026. Available at: https://lifesciencedaily.news/lillypod-drug-discovery-lillys-nvidia-supercomputer-explained/
72. Tracxn. "List of acquisitions by Lilly." Available at: https://tracxn.com/d/acquisitions/acquisitions-by-lilly/__5ZzZDvzHt6xDxSZow73wGVn8fOwpOYFJ7mnkEv_XeGk
73. Eli Lilly and Company. Form 8-K, fourth-quarter 2024 sales and earnings press release. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Available at: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/59478/000005947825000037/q424lillysalesandearningsp.htm
74. Eli Lilly and Company. Form 8-K, fourth-quarter 2025 sales and earnings press release. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Available at: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/59478/000005947826000008/q425lillysalesandearningsp.htm
75. Eli Lilly and Company. Q1 2025 earnings presentation. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/static-files/761fadb8-b911-46d5-85b3-8bac4e054d73
76. Eli Lilly and Company. Q2 2025 earnings presentation. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/static-files/b7c7e82b-e667-42ba-827c-1faecba3e4c8
77. Eli Lilly and Company. Q3 2025 earnings presentation. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/static-files/81645112-510f-4ce8-a860-c74596c1caa2
78. Eli Lilly and Company. Q4 2025 earnings presentation. Available at: https://investor.lilly.com/static-files/45a92498-43d0-4e2d-a4e6-a9131841cfd6
79. Eli Lilly and Company. "Lilly Reports Full Q4 2024 Financial Results and Provides 2025 Guidance." Press release, February 6, 2025. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lilly-reports-full-q4-2024-financial-results-and-provides-2025-guidance-302369432.html
80. Eli Lilly and Company. "Lilly Reports First-Quarter 2025 Financial Results and Highlights Pipeline Momentum." Press release, May 1, 2025. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lilly-reports-first-quarter-2025-financial-results-and-highlights-pipeline-momentum-302443401.html
81. Wikipedia. "Eli Lilly and Company," Products section, citing Lilly's FY2025 Form 10-K, Item 1 Business. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Lilly_and_Company
82. Fierce Pharma. "Even with pricing headwinds, Eli Lilly expects sales surge to continue in 2026." February 2026. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/even-pricing-headwinds-eli-lilly-expects-sales-continue-surge-2026
83. Drug and Device World. "Lilly's stock surges as diabetes products push 2024 revenue to $45 Bn." Available at: https://druganddeviceworld.com/2025/02/06/lilly-2024-revenue-stock-increase/
84. market.us. "Eli Lilly and Company Statistics, Trends, Revenue and Facts," citing Eli Lilly SEC filings for FY2024 brand-level revenue. Consulted to cross-check FY2024 baseline figures for legacy brands; no FY2025 brand-level figures were available from this or any other source for brands below the $1 Bn threshold used in Infographics 1.2 and 1.5. Available at: https://market.us/statistics/pharmaceutical-industry/eli-lilly-and-company/
85. Eli Lilly and Company. "Lilly Reports Solid Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2021 Financial Results." Press release, February 3, 2022. Source for Retevmo FY2021 revenue. Available at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lilly-reports-solid-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2021-financial-results-recent-late-stage-pipeline-successes-set-up-next-wave-of-innovative-medicines-for-patients-301474444.html
86. Fierce Pharma. "After splashing $1B, Roche returns lagging cancer drug Gavreto to Blueprint Medicines." February 24, 2023. Source for Retevmo FY2022 revenue, cited in competitive coverage of Blueprint Medicines' rival RET inhibitor. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-splashing-1b-roche-returns-lagging-cancer-drug-gavreto-blueprint
87. Fierce Pharma. "After Roche breakup, Blueprint Medicines finds Gavreto a new home at Rigel." February 22, 2024. Source for Retevmo FY2023 revenue. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-roche-breakup-blueprint-medicines-finds-gavreto-new-home-rigel
88. pharmaphorum. "Lilly's Retevmo cleared for RET-positive child cancers." 2024. Corroborating source for Retevmo FY2023 revenue. Available at: https://pharmaphorum.com/news/lillys-retevmo-cleared-ret-positive-child-cancers
89. Fierce Pharma. "ASCO: Lilly ties Retevmo to 'dramatic' outcomes in early-stage lung cancer with rare RET biomarker." June 1, 2026. Source for Retevmo FY2024 and FY2025 revenue. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/asco-lilly-ties-retevmo-dramatic-outcomes-early-stage-lung-cancer-rare-ret-biomarker
90. Fierce Pharma. "In BTK clash, Lilly upstart Jaypirca measures up to warhorse Imbruvica." July 30, 2025. Source for Jaypirca FY2024 revenue, cited in competitive coverage against AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson's Imbruvica. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/btk-clash-lilly-upstart-jaypirca-measures-warhorse-imbruvica
91. Fierce Pharma. "With 'compelling' effect size, Eli Lilly's Jaypirca advances a step closer to first-line use in CLL." September 8, 2025. Corroborating source for Jaypirca H1 2025 revenue. Available at: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/compelling-results-eli-lillys-jaypirca-advances-one-step-closer-first-line-use
92. Incyte Corporation. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Source for Olumiant outside-U.S. royalty revenue, FY2023 through FY2025. Available at: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/879169/000087916926000010/incy-20251231.htm