The $21 billion deal gives Abbott a commanding position in a fast-growing market where blood tests may soon catch cancers early
March 23rd, 2026: Abbott closes the acquisitionNew here? Follow stories to track developments over time. Create a free account to get updates when stories you care about change.
Abbott Laboratories closed its $21 billion acquisition of Exact Sciences on March 23, making the maker of the Cologuard colorectal cancer screening test a wholly owned subsidiary of one of the world's largest healthcare companies. The all-cash deal, at $105 per share, passed through antitrust review without a second request from regulators—a sign of how little the two companies' product lines overlapped before this combination.
The acquisition significantly expands Abbott's diagnostics business. Abbott's diagnostics division, already a $9.3 billion business focused on laboratory instruments and point-of-care testing, now adds roughly $3 billion in annual revenue from cancer screening and precision oncology. More importantly, it gains a pipeline of next-generation blood tests—including a multi-cancer early detection test called Cancerguard—that could eventually screen for dozens of cancer types from a single blood draw.
Why it matters
Cancer blood tests are approaching clinical reality. This deal gives Abbott a substantial portfolio to develop and market them.
No questions yet — be the first to ask.
Exact Sciences HQ
Robert B Ford
Abbott Laboratories
Abbott to Buy Cancer-Screener Exact Sciences for $21 Billion
Bloomberg Podcasts
Abbott acquires Exact Sciences for $23 billion
Channel 3000 / News 3 Now
Biotech's Next Boom? Inside The Multibillion Dollar Cancer ...
Investor's Business Daily
Images from Openverse under Creative Commons licenses. Videos from YouTube.
Curated perspectives — historical figures and your fellow readers.
Fictional AI pastiche — not real quote.
"Twenty-one billion dollars to find out what's killing us — one can only hope the board of directors submits to the test first."
Exploring all sides of a story is often best achieved with Play.
Your progress in this debate will be lost.
Choose one persona for each side of the debate
Choose personas with different perspectives for a more dynamic debate.
Select debater for this side:
No debate personas available right now.
Select debater for this side:
No debate personas available right now.
Make your prediction before the referee scores
Pick the question both personas must answer in the final round
Debate Oracle! You called every round!
Sharp Instincts! You know your debaters!
The Coin Flip Strategist! Perfectly balanced!
The Contrarian! Bold predictions!
Inverse Genius! Try betting the opposite next time!
A diversified healthcare company with $44.3 billion in 2025 revenue across diagnostics, medical devices, nutrition, and pharmaceuticals, operating in more than 160 countries.
The maker of the Cologuard colorectal cancer screening test and the Oncotype DX breast cancer diagnostic, with $3.25 billion in 2025 revenue and a pipeline of next-generation blood-based cancer detection tests.
A liquid biopsy company whose Shield blood test competes directly with Cologuard in colorectal cancer screening, and whose multi-cancer detection platform overlaps with Exact Sciences' Cancerguard pipeline.
August 2014 March 2026
The deal closed as scheduled. Exact Sciences became a wholly owned subsidiary of Abbott, with its Madison, Wisconsin headquarters maintained.
Abbott confirmed it had obtained all required regulatory approvals, including expiration of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act waiting period, without a second request from antitrust regulators.
Over 99% of votes cast at a special meeting approved the acquisition. A separate advisory vote on executive compensation packages tied to the deal failed, with shareholders voting more than two-to-one against.
Abbott and Exact Sciences announced a definitive merger agreement at $105 per share in cash, a 21.8% premium. Both boards unanimously approved the deal.
Exact Sciences launched Cologuard Plus, achieving 94% cancer sensitivity and 91% specificity while reducing false positives by nearly 40% compared to the original test.
Exact Sciences bought Genomic Health for $2.8 billion, adding the Oncotype DX breast cancer treatment decision test and expanding beyond colorectal cancer screening.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Cologuard as the first noninvasive stool DNA screening test for colorectal cancer, with simultaneous national Medicare coverage—the first device or diagnostic to achieve both at once.
3 moments from history that rhyme with this story — and how they unfolded.
Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche paid $2.4 billion to acquire the remaining shares of Foundation Medicine, a cancer genomic profiling company, bringing total ownership to 100%. The deal gave Roche full control of FoundationOne CDx, an FDA-approved test that sequences tumor DNA to match patients with targeted therapies.
Foundation Medicine was kept as an autonomous subsidiary within Roche, preserving its culture and partnerships with other pharmaceutical companies.
Roche built Foundation Medicine into the standard-of-care platform for companion diagnostics in oncology, validating the model of a diversified healthcare company acquiring a pure-play cancer diagnostics innovator.
Abbott is running the same playbook at nearly ten times the scale. The Roche/Foundation Medicine deal showed that a large acquirer could preserve a diagnostics innovator's capabilities while adding global distribution—exactly what Abbott is betting it can do with Exact Sciences.
Illumina, the dominant maker of DNA sequencing machines, acquired Grail—developer of the Galleri multi-cancer blood test—for $7.1 billion over the objections of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC argued Illumina could disadvantage Grail's competitors who depended on Illumina's sequencing technology. A federal court upheld the FTC's order, and Illumina announced it would divest Grail in December 2023.
Illumina was forced to unwind the deal at significant financial and operational cost, and Grail lost years of potential development momentum.
The case established that vertical integration in cancer diagnostics faces serious regulatory scrutiny when the acquirer controls an essential input that competitors also need.
Abbott's clean regulatory clearance stands in sharp contrast. Because Abbott and Exact Sciences had minimal product overlap—Abbott makes lab instruments and rapid tests, Exact Sciences makes cancer screening tests—regulators saw no competitive harm. The Illumina/Grail cautionary tale explains why Abbott was a better structural fit as an acquirer.
Danaher Corporation paid $21.4 billion for General Electric's biopharma business, gaining a $3.2 billion revenue platform in bioprocessing equipment and consumables used to manufacture biological drugs. It was one of the largest healthcare deals of the decade at the time.
The business, renamed Cytiva, became Danaher's largest segment and immediately benefited from surging demand for vaccine and biologic manufacturing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The deal transformed Danaher into a life sciences powerhouse and validated the strategy of diversified companies making $20 billion-plus bets on high-growth healthcare segments.
At nearly identical deal size, Abbott is making the same strategic bet Danaher made—using a single large acquisition to enter a fast-growing healthcare market where it previously had little presence. Danaher's success provides the template Abbott is following.