Novartis may have signed off on the second-largest pharma acquisition of 2025 so far, but, as the company’s CEO sees it—it’s never about the price tag.
“We're not really too concerned about particular size ranges of the deal,” Vas Narasimhan, M.D., told Fierce Biotech this morning. “If the deal fits [our] profile, we'll certainly look at it and pursue it.”
The Swiss pharma paid $12 billion for Avidity Biosciences and its three late-stage antibody-oligonucleotide conjugates in October, justifying the hefty price by claiming the deal would “unlock multi-billion-dollar opportunities with planned product launches before 2030.”
Those hoped-for launches include delpacibart zotadirsen (del-zota), for which phase 1/2 data in Duchenne muscular dystrophy impressed investors last year. The candidate, which uses an anti-TfR1 antibody to deliver an oligonucleotide to target cells, was tied to a statistically significant 25% increase in dystrophin production among people amenable to exon 44 skipping.
Novartis agreed to pay $72 per share of Avidity—a 42% increase to Avidity’s closing price of $49.15 price on the last day of trading before the announcement. The deal values the company at about $12 billion on a fully diluted basis, making the Avidity acquisition the second-biggest pharma deal of the year to date—only surpassed by Johnson & Johnson’s $14.6 billion buyout of central-nervous-system-focused Intra-Cellular Therapies back in January.
In an early morning call with the press to kick off a Meet Novartis Management event in London, Narasimhan gave Fierce some more insight into why the company went big to pick up Avidity.
“We want to be one of the leaders in neuromuscular diseases,” the CEO said. “We are one of the global leaders in RNA therapeutics. We have a very strong neuroscience footprint and an ability to reach the relevant positions with our footprint with Zolgensma.”
“This was a very good fit—so we went after it,” Narasimhan added.
Responding to Fierce’s question about whether the market should expect any more major deals from Novartis in the coming months, Narasimhan said the pharma’s “approach to M&A really remains unchanged.”
He explained: “What we look for is high-value assets that can build our core therapeutic areas as well as technology areas, and then strengthen our growth profile. So, we will continue to look for external opportunities, but I think we'll also have a high bar.”
When asked on the call what upcoming readouts he’s most excited about, Narasimhan said one of the trials he’ll be “watching very closely” is pelacarsen. The pharma is expecting data from a phase 3 trial of the antisense med aimed at preventing cardiovascular events in patients with elevated levels of lipoprotein in the first half of next year.
The CEO also name-checked an upcoming phase 3 readout for abelacimab—a clot-busting antibody Novartis reacquired for $925 million upfront in February—as well as trials to see whether its approved BTK inhibitor Rhapsido is effective against chronic inducible urticaria or multiple sclerosis.
The fourth drug on Narasimhan’s mind is zigakibart, an anti-APRIL antibody in phase 3 testing for renal diseases like IgA nephropathy.