AbbVie is nearing an all-cash deal to buy Apogee Therapeutics for about $10.9 billion, the Financial Times reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, an acquisition that would hand the Illinois-based drugmaker a late-stage inflammatory-disease program led by an experimental eczema drug. An announcement could come as early as Monday, the FT said, provided negotiations close without last-minute issues.
The price would value Apogee at a roughly 60 percent premium to its Thursday closing share price, according to the report carried on the Reuters wire. Apogee's stock was up 19.7 percent year to date heading into Friday and the company carried a market capitalization of about $6.81 billion, according to LSEG data, meaning the cash offer would price the biotech well above where public markets had it before the report.
What AbbVie is buying
Apogee Therapeutics is a biotechnology company founded in 2022 that develops therapies for inflammatory and immune diseases. Its lead asset is an eczema drug, and last month the company secured a financing package worth up to $1.3 billion from Blackstone Life Sciences to support the late-stage development and potential commercialization of that program.
That Blackstone deal, struck only weeks before the AbbVie talks surfaced, set an outside marker for how much capital private investors were willing to put behind the eczema candidate without taking the company itself. An $11 billion takeout would clear that bar by an order of magnitude and hand AbbVie ownership of the asset rather than a non-dilutive funding partner.
A pipeline addition
The Reuters wire described Apogee as an inflammatory-disease drug developer, and an acquisition would add a late-stage program in that franchise to AbbVie's bench. The move would land days after a separate pipeline win: the FT report came after AbbVie won FDA approval for pivekimab sunirine-pvzy, a treatment for a rare blood cancer, further bolstering its pipeline.
What is not yet known
Neither company has confirmed the talks. AbbVie and Apogee did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment, and AbbVie's offices are closed in the United States to observe Juneteenth, the wire noted, limiting the channels through which either side could speak before Monday. The FT framed the Monday announcement as contingent on the negotiations being completed without last-minute issues, leaving room for the terms to change or the talks to slip before any signing.
The two source reports available Friday were both wire-style accounts of the same FT scoop, with no independent confirmation, no named principals on either side and no detail on financing or board approvals. Apogee shareholders have not voted, and no antitrust review has begun.
If the deal is announced Monday on the terms the FT described, an all-cash $10.9 billion price at a 60 percent premium would rank among the largest pharmaceutical acquisitions of the year and would mark AbbVie's most expensive bet to date on Apogee's late-stage eczema program.