Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

Sun Pharma has agreed to pay $11.75 billion for Organon in a merger of companies that each generated sales of $6.2 billion last year. It is the largest deal ever struck by an Indian biopharma company, Sun said. Already the largest biopharma company in India, generics powerhouse Sun Pharma has doubled in size with its acquisition (PDF) of women’s health leader Organon. With its $11.75 billion buyout, Sun has picked up a drugmaker that matched the $6.2 billion in sales that it generated in 2025.Sun is paying $14 per share, which is a 24% premium on Organon’s closing price on Friday. It is also a more than 100% premium on Organon’s share price at the start of April. With the agreement, which is expected to close by early 2027, Sun’s stock increased by 7%, while Organon’s jumped by 17%.The deal, which is the largest ever by an Indian biopharma, the company said, will boost Sun’s portfolio of innovative medicines and will catapult it to No. 7 among the world’s top sellers of biosimilars, the company said in its release. While Indian companies are exempt from paying tariffs on the generic products they export to the United States, Sun’s U.S. sales have declined recently, prompting it to boost its presence in branded products and biosimilars.Organon’s stock had been weighed down by “heavy headwinds,” according to Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat, citing the New Jersey company’s debt, its oncoming loss of exclusivity of contraceptive implant Nexplanon and its “bad M&A to digest,” which is a reference to Organon’s $1.2 billion 2024 buyout of Dermavant. The acquisition brought non-steroid skin cream Vtama, which achieved sales of $128 million in 2025, coming up short of the $150 million target the company set at the start of the year.  Since it was spun out of Merck in 2021, Organon’s sales have been stagnant, toggling between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion for each of the last four years.The company, however, brings “excellent people from Merck” and an “excellent set of legacy Merck brands,” Raffat wrote in his note to clients. The deal is the largest in the industry so far this year, topping Eli Lilly’s recent buyouts of Centessa Pharmaceuticals and Kelonia Therapeutics, which were for headline values of $7.8 billion and $7 billion, respectively. Also, within the last five weeks as biopharma M&A activity has heated up, Merck put up $6.7 billion to acquire Terns Pharmaceuticals, Biogen picked up Apellis for $5.6 billion and Gilead purchased Tubulis for a headline value of $5 billion.Mostly known as a seller of generics, Sun has built a specialty business in dermatology, ophthalmology and oncology-dermatology in recent years, thanks in part to acquisitions of Concert Pharmaceuticals, for $576 million in 2023, to gain a JAK inhibitor treatment for alopecia, Leqselvi, and Checkpoint Therapeutics, for $418 million last year, to gain cancer immunotherapy Unloxcyt. Organon traces its roots to 1923 in The Netherlands. Schering-Plough acquired the company in 2007, two years before it merged with Merck. Today, the company sells (PDF) more than 70 medicines in roughly 140 countries and manufactures its products at six sites in Europe.“This transaction is a logical next step in strengthening Sun Pharma’s global business,” Kirti Ganorkar, Sun’s managing director, said in a release. “Together, we will become a partner of choice for acquiring and launching new products. Our immediate priorities will be business continuity, disciplined integration and responsible value creation. We see strong potential in leveraging Organon’s talent pool.”

Eli Lilly keeps putting its GLP-1 windfall to use. On Monday, the anti-obesity drugmaker announced its latest deal to expand its pipeline of future drugs, saying it would spend as much as $2.3 billion on Ajax Therapeutics and its clinical-stage JAK2 work in blood cancer. Lilly and Ajax didn’t disclose how much of that is in cash, and how much is in future results-based incentive payouts. The first test of that bet is likely to come later this year, when Ajax’s lead drug, AJ1-11095, will report proof-of-concept data from a Phase 1 trial in the rare blood cancer known as myelofibrosis. Those data could serve as the basis for “rapidly advancing” the treatment into registrational trials, said Jacob Van Naarden, Lilly’s head of corporate business development and president of Lilly Oncology. Lilly is “excited about the potential” for the experimental medicine to “deliver deeper and more durable efficacy” than existing treatments in the first- and second-line settings, he said in a press release . Ross Levine, one of Ajax’s scientific co-founders who is also Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s chief scientific officer, previously told Endpoints News that other JAK inhibitors on the market don’t yet do enough for patients. “They don’t achieve molecular or pathologic regression. We don’t get patients where we want them to get,” he told Endpoints in 2024. Ajax executives weren’t made available for an interview Monday. Lilly and Ajax’s announcement was one of three M&A deals announced Monday, alongside takeovers by Sun Pharma and Ligand Pharmaceuticals. The Ajax tie-up also marks Lilly’s sixth acquisition announced so far this year, including four in the past 28 days. In total it made about 40 deals last year as part of its “string of pearls” dealmaking that involves a proactive “trade in front of data” approach, Lilly CEO David Ricks said on a podcast last week. Those takeovers include two deals in cancer, and others in autoimmune conditions , sleep disorders and cardiovascular health . While most of those have been small, “that ‘cheaper’ part will change,” Ricks said on the podcast , as it prepares for when obesity sales level out. He said the company will likely “lift up the price number” on M&A targets. This also isn’t the first time Ajax attracted M&A interest. At the time of a $40 million fundraise in 2021, an unnamed large pharma wanted to buy the small startup, but the company believed it had the right team to “get to the best compound that we could take into the clinic,” CEO and co-founder Martin Vogelbaum previously told Endpoints . Two years ago, Lilly took part in Ajax’s last disclosed financing, a $95 million Series C. A few months later, in October 2024, the New York and Cambridge, MA-based startup went into the clinic with AJ1-11095. The drug was designed with the help of collaborator Schrödinger.

After months of wooing Organon, Sun Pharmaceutical finally signed a definitive agreement to acquire the women's health-focused Merck & Co. spinout in an all-cash deal valued at $11.75 billion — marking the biggest global M&A transaction ever involving a major Indian pharma. "Organon's portfolio, capabilities and global reach are highly complementary to our own, and we believe that bringing the two organisations together can create a stronger and more diversified platform," said Dilip Shanghvi, executive chairman of Sun Pharma.Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, the Indian drugmaker will purchase all issued and outstanding Organon shares at $14 apiece, while also inheriting the latter's $8.6-billion debt. The acquisition, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, is set to conclude early next year.The combined entity is expected to generate revenues of approximately $12.4 billion, placing it among the world's top 25 pharmaceutical companies. Notably, the transaction marks Sun Pharma's entry into biosimilars, ranking it seventh globally in the segment. Sun Pharma — which has steadily established a foothold in the US through its psoriasis treatment Ilumya (tildrakizumab), hair loss therapy Leqselvi (deuruxolitinib) and oncology drug Unloxcyt (cosibelimab-ipdl) — noted that innovative medicines would account for 27% of the consolidated group's revenue.Rumours of the deal first surfaced in January, when The Economic Times reported that Sun Pharma had submitted a non-binding offer of $10 billion for Organon, which the former deemed "speculative in nature." Following a due diligence period, a binding offer of $12 billion was reportedly prepared by Sun Pharma earlier this month. The bid was later said to have been upped to $13 billion after another suitor interested in the takeover emerged — a consortium of German drugmaker Grünenthal and private equity firm EQT.Meanwhile, Organon — which posted a revenue of $6.2 billion last year — had been in pursuit of a strategic transaction following a period of turbulence. CEO Kevin Ali was forced to step down last October following an internal investigation into what the board characterised as "improper" sales practices linked to the company's top-selling Nexplanon contraceptive implant. Organon's biosimilar manufacturing partner Samsung Bioepis was reported to be a potential bidder prior to Sun Pharma, which the South Korean firm quickly denied.