Confirmed news of Eli Lilly and Co. purchasing Ventyx Biosciences Inc. for $14 per share arrived within a day of swirling rumors that drove shares of the San Diego-based biopharma company up by more than 52% at one point on Jan. 7.

Ventyx (NASDAQ:VTYX) ended the day at $13.73, up $3.68, or 36.6%. News of Indianapolis-based Lilly’s offer came just after market close.

Ventyx, which was first incorporated in Delaware in November 2018, develops oral therapies for autoimmune, inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases. The company’s pipeline consists of NLRP3 inhibitors, including VTX-2735 and VTX-3232. First-generation NLRP3 inhibitors have trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier and often require high systemic doses to be efficacious within the central nervous system, Ventyx said.

“There is increasing evidence that inflammation is a key driver of many chronic diseases,” Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific and product officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories. He added that Ventyx’s pipeline offers better treatment options for challenging diseases.

Lilly “is an ideal strategic partner, with unparalleled resources, a passion for innovative oral drugs and a commitment to advance novel therapies that fill a vast unmet need for patients suffering from these debilitating diseases and disorders,” said Raju Mohan, Ventyx’s CEO.

Terms of the acquisition call for Lilly to buy all outstanding shares of Ventyx for $14 each in cash, equal to an equity value of about $1.2 billion. It is expected to close in the first half of 2026. The purchase price represents a premium of about 62% to the 30-day volume-weighted average trading price of Ventyx’s stock as of Jan. 5. Both boards have approved the transaction, and entities affiliated with New Science Ventures and all directors and officers of Ventyx have signed voting and support agreements agreeing to vote to approve the deal.

Cantor analyst Carter Gould said that his team likes “that Lilly is taking chances on potentially transformative opportunities at relatively small dollar amounts. Indeed, the program would sit nicely within Lilly’s cardiometabolic franchise.”

VTX-2735 reached proof of concept in a phase II in patients with the rare genetic disease cryopyrin-associated periodic syndromes (CAPS), which involves overactive NLRP3 due to a gain-of-function mutation in the gene. Treatment showed meaningful improvement in both inflammatory biomarkers and patient-reported symptom scores. VTX-2735 is currently in a phase II for recurrent pericarditis and has potential for other systemic inflammatory conditions that include cardiovascular, metabolic, rheumatic, dermatologic and rare genetic diseases.

VTX-3232 is in phase II trials for Parkinson’s disease and obesity-associated cardiometabolic diseases, but it also could be applied to other neuroinflammatory diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cardiometabolic diseases, Ventyx said. Its potential in Parkinson’s is based on evidence suggesting that microglial NLRP3 activation is an important axis for disease development. NLRP3-mediated inflammation is also tied to obesity and metabolic disorders, and the company rolled out positive phase II results in this indication in October.

Also part of Ventyx pipeline at the phase II stage is VTX-002 (tamuzimod), an S1PR1 modulator, for ulcerative colitis, and VTX-958, an oral, allosteric TYK2 inhibitor, for Crohn’s disease.