AbbVie's biggest deal since 2019 could land soon

AbbVie (ABBV) is closing in on a deal to buy Apogee Therapeutics for $10.9 billion in cash, according to a Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter in the Financial Times.

The price values Apogee at a roughly 60% premium to its closing share price on Thursday, June 18, a steep markup for a company that has never sold a single approved drug.

AbbVie usually reaches for biotechs with marketed products or late stage data in hand, not one still years from its first launch.

An announcement could come as early as Monday, June 22, Reuters noted, provided negotiations wrap up without last-minute issues. Neither company has confirmed the talks publicly, and AbbVie and Apogee did not immediately respond to requests for comment, partly because AbbVie’s U.S. offices were closed for Juneteenth. 

The gap between Apogee’s stand-alone value and the offer price tells its own story. Apogee’s shares were up nearly 20% so far this year, giving it a market capitalization of about $6.8 billion, according to Reuters.

A $10.9 billion check is roughly 60% more than that, which means AbbVie is paying not just for what Apogee has built, but also for what it might prove out later.

Apogee’s pipeline rests on a single drug candidate

Apogee Therapeutics (APGE) is a clinical stage biotech with no commercial products, building antibody drugs for inflammatory and immune diseases such as atopic dermatitis, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the company’s pipeline page says.

Its lead candidate, zumilokibart, blocks a cytokine called IL-13 that drives skin inflammation in atopic dermatitis.

Related: OpenAI admits enterprises need better control over AI costs

That matters for patients because Apogee’s own trial data show the drug can maintain results with dosing as infrequent as twice a year, the company reported, compared with up to 26 injections annually for some existing treatments.

That promise already drew outside capital before AbbVie showed up. In May, Apogee secured up to $1.3 billion in financing from Blackstone Life Sciences to fund a Phase 3 trial and a potential launch without selling more stock. AbbVie would be buying into that same bet, just years before any regulatory verdict.

NurPhoto &sol Getty Images

AbbVie needs new growth beyond Humira

AbbVie’s three lead immunology drugs, Skyrizi, Rinvoq, and the aging Humira, brought in $30.4 billion combined last year, up 14% from 2024.

Almost all of that growth points to Skyrizi and Rinvoq filling the hole left by Humira, which keeps losing ground to biosimilar competitors.

More Health Care:

• Mark Cuban floats controversial way to cut health costs
• Medicare and health insurance company files Chapter 11 bankruptcy
• Microsoft and Copilot just hit a jackpot in healthcare

Investors care because that math will not hold forever. AbbVie needs new growth drivers behind its current stars, and it has been buying rather than waiting to build them.

Apogee would not be the company’s first early-stage bet. AbbVie paid up to $2.1 billion last year for Capstan Therapeutics, a Phase 1 cell therapy developer in autoimmune disease, and the FDA cleared its first antibody drug conjugate for blood cancer in May.

Apogee would be the largest and riskiest of the group.

AbbVie's Apogee deal reflects a broader pharma trend

If it closes, the Apogee purchase would be AbbVie’s biggest since its $63 billion acquisition of Botox maker Allergan in 2019, a deal that closed years after Apogee even existed.

The contrast is the point. AbbVie once bought scale and an approved product lineup. Now it is paying nearly $11 billion for a company whose biggest asset has not finished testing.

That pattern is becoming the norm across big pharma, where patent cliffs are forcing large companies to pay up early rather than wait for biotechs to de-risk their own pipelines.

AbbVie’s strategy is coherent on paper: trade cash for time in a market where Humira’s decline is not slowing down.

Whether that strategy is worth the price is the tension Wall Street will spend the next year pricing, not the one investors are likely to reject outright.

Related: Mark Cuban floats controversial way to cut health costs