Neurocrine Scoops Up Hunger-Drug Maker in Latest Multi-Billion-Dollar Pharma Deal
Soleno Therapeutics’s Vykat XR is the first drug to be approved for treating the insatiable hunger caused by Prader-Willi Syndrome.
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Neurocrine Biosciences is betting the lab that the next blockbuster is a “hunger-blocker.” The bioscience company agreed yesterday to buy Soleno Therapeutics for $2.9 billion. Per share, Neurocrine’s paying more than a 30% premium on Soleno’s Friday closing price and greater than 50% on its average price for the past month.
The acquisition focuses on Vykat XR, the first drug approved to treat the insatiable hunger associated with a rare condition called Prader-Willi. Though Prader-Willi affects fewer than 20,000 Americans, Vykat is Neurocrine’s first step into metabolic treatments, a must-have during the current GLP-1 moment.
Medicines & Acquisitions
Soleno is Neurocrine’s biggest buy ever. Vykat brought in $190 million last year, even though it was only FDA-approved in March, and $92 million just in 2025’s last quarter. For Neurocrine, Vykat’s expected to pad sales coming from the company’s two main products, rare-disease drugs Ingrezza and Crenessity, which brought in $2.8 billion last year.
The acquisition adds Neurocrine to the ranks of mid-sized drugmakers scooping up promising upstarts to build out their medicine cabinets. BioMarin agreed to buy Amicus Therapeutics for $4.8 billion last year, while Genmab spent $8 billion on Merus. Pharma dealmaking activity has continued ramping up this year:
- More than $63 billion in US biotech deals have gone down in the first three months of 2026, Dealogic found, making it the sector’s fifth-best quarter for dealmaking in the past decade.
- In the past two weeks, many of the world’s biggest drugmakers spent billions scooping up smaller players. Eli Lilly agreed to buy sleep medicine maker Centessa for $7.8 billion and Biogen acquired Apellis for $5.6 billion. Gilead Sciences and Merck also struck multi-billion-dollar deals.
Favorable Prognosis: Many of the latest acquisitions target a handful of newer, successful drugs as pharmaceutical companies covet the next generation of blockbusters. Some of the biggest companies have started spending more as patents on their moneymaking drugs expire. Merck, for instance, has acquired three companies for more than $6 billion each over the past 10 months as it prepares to lose its exclusive selling rights to cancer treatment Keytruda.
