Everything changed with a white envelope.
On Dec. 20, 2018, Jacob Van Naarden, the chief operating officer of a biotech called Loxo Oncology, and his boss, CEO Josh Bilenker, arrived at their Stamford, Conn., offices for a meeting with Levi Garraway, then the head of oncology research at Eli Lilly. Both remember that they planned a simple meeting of “hanging out” with Garraway and trading updates about their companies.
Neither, Van Naarden said, had looked at the calendar invite. “And so we walk into our conference room, and there’s like a room full of Lilly people,” Van Naarden told STAT. Garraway had brought Lilly’s chief scientific officer, its head of business development, the head of oncology, and the chief financial officer. After some awkward pleasantries, a single white envelope containing deal terms was slid across the table.
“I said something silly like, ‘If I’d known it was going to be this kind of meeting, I would have put on a jacket,’” Bilenker recalled. “‘But this looks like something my board needs to hear about.’” Van Naarden said the meeting lasted less than 20 minutes. He and Bilenker left the Lilly executives to their sandwiches. A month later, Eli Lilly purchased Loxo for $8 billion in cash.
Lilly’s purchase paid dividends not simply because of the cancer drugs and research Loxo brought the drug giant, but because Loxo’s executives have become key players in the company’s leadership team. In tech, deals done to get talent — acqui-hires — are common. In the pharmaceutical industry, they are not.
Bilenker left Loxo in 2021 to form a new firm, Treeline Biosciences, which has raised more than $1 billion in venture capital, according to Pitchbook. But Van Naarden not only now runs all of Eli Lilly’s oncology efforts in research and development, but as of 2025 served as the company’s head of business development, overseeing all dealmaking for a company that now claims the highest stock market value in the pharmaceutical industry.
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