AbbVie acquires Pharmacyclics (2015)
AbbVie agreed to pay about $21 billion for Pharmacyclics, buying ibrutinib (Imbruvica), a single blood-cancer drug with rapidly growing sales. The price was a bet on one molecule rather than a diversified pipeline.
Imbruvica became a blockbuster, generating billions in annual revenue and anchoring AbbVie's oncology franchise.
The deal became a benchmark for single-asset acquisitions that pay off when a drug expands across multiple indications.
FB102 is positioned as one mechanism with potential across several autoimmune diseases. argenx is running the same expansion playbook, paying upfront for a platform it hopes will reach multiple markets.
