AstraZeneca may not need a major acquisition to sustain growth beyond 2030—but the British pharma is reportedly not stopping making big bets.
In AZ’s latest efforts to secure its future, the company is said to have made a roughly $10 billion offer to purchase Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
Rhythm currently markets Imcivree, a first-in-class weight-loss medicine approved for people with specific genetic conditions or rare brain injuries, raking in $92 million in third-quarter sales. The Boston biopharma is also developing a pipeline targeting the MC4R pathway to treat rare neuroendocrine diseases.
AZ made a $124-per-share offer for Rhythm last month, according to the WSJ. The U.K. pharma’s bid reached as much as $134 a share, including potential milestones, Reuters reports, citing three people familiar with the matter.
A $124-per-share upfront payment would already represent a 35% premium over Rhythm’s closing price prior to Wednesday’s report, and AZ’s existing interest in obesity and rare disease would make the buyout a strategic fit. However, analysts at Jefferies, Leerink Partners and William Blair suggest a bidding war could be brewing and that Rhythm is unlikely to settle for AZ’s current pitch.
“We would not be surprised to see multiple offers on this incredibly valuable asset, so we wonder if there will be multiple bidders,” William Blair’s Alethia Young wrote in a Nov. 4 note.
Her team recently started covering Rhythm as one of their top picks. She currently assigns Rhythm a discounted cash flow valuation at $166 per share after removing values tied to assets beyond the existing forecast period.
To Young, any large-cap biopharma company with a metabolic business could be interested in Rhythm. “In our view, that is basically every biopharma company out there,” she said.
Rhythm “has long been an attractive M&A candidate, […] given its scalable rare-obesity franchise and indication-expansion potential,” Leerink’s Basma Radwan, Ph.D., said in a Nov. 5 note. She labeled AZ’s price tag as “broadly fair,” but added that “[w]e would not be surprised by negotiations for high milestone payments, or by competing bids.”
Analysts currently foresee $2 billion-plus in peak sales potential from Imcivree’s recently added hypothalamic obesity indication, in which damage to the hypothalamus, a controller of hunger and how the body burns energy, causes severe obesity.
However, AZ’s offer suggests “minimal valuation” for Rhythm’s Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) program, including an MC4R-specific agonist called bivamelagon that is moving toward phase 3, Jefferies analyst Dennis Ding said in a Nov. 5 note.
Rhythm’s management team is bullish about PWS, having characterized it as a similar, if not bigger, market opportunity as hypothalamic obesity, Ding noted. So management “has been frustrated investors are giving minimal credit for PWS,” she said. As a result, “we think it’s unlikely a deal gets done unless PWS value starts getting reflected,” Ding concluded.
Buying Rhythm would beef up AZ’s growing obesity portfolio and complement its Alexion rare disease franchise, whose growth, Ding said, “has moderated a bit.”
As the time of publication, Rhythm has not issued any public announcement since its third-quarter earnings report on Nov. 3, before the WSJ report. The company “does not comment on market rumors or speculation,” a spokesperson told Fierce. AZ has also not publicly commented on the rumored deal.
In the obesity field, AZ struck a massive deal with China’s CSPC Pharma in January 2026. The potential $18.5 billion pact covers eight programs of once-monthly injectable candidates for weight management.
For common weight-loss management, AZ is targeting patients who don’t necessarily look obese or even overweight but who tend to accumulate fat tissues in their abdomen and organs such as the liver and the pancreas with metabolic syndromes, CEO Pascal Soriot told reporters during a conference call about AZ’s third-quarter earnings.
AZ’s reported bid for Rhythm comes after a reported mega-merger with Bristol Myers Squibb fell through. Alongside its Q3 report, AZ launched a major restructuring program targeting $1.5 billion in annual cost savings by 2029. Management framed the overhaul as redirecting resources to pipeline growth.
The British pharma has maintained its goal to achieve $80 billion in 2030 sales.