By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Shares of the cancer diagnostics company Exact Sciences surged 25% late Wednesday, after a report said the conglomerate Abbott Laboratories is close to a deal to acquire the company.
Neither Abbott nor Exact Sciences immediately responded to a request for comment. The Bloomberg report didn't include any financial terms of a potential deal.
Exact Sciences sells Cologuard, an at-home colon cancer screening test. As of the end of the day on Tuesday, its shares were up 24% this year, and its market value was $13.2 billion. Its revenue was $2.8 billion last year.
Abbott, one of the largest healthcare companies in the U.S., sells a range of diagnostic products, including at-home Covid-19 tests, complex screening tools used in laboratories, and smaller machines that can sit on a desk in a doctor's office. Abbott also sells infant formula, medical devices, and a number of different prescription drugs.
Abbott's market value is over $220 billion. The stock was down 3% after the Bloomberg report.
Some analysts were skeptical of the possible deal.
"We struggle to see the strategic fit," Leerink Partners analyst Puneet Souda, who has an Outperform rating on Exact Sciences, wrote Wednesday. Souda wrote that Abbott sells diagnostic instruments, while Exact Sciences' business revolves around a central lab that processes samples sent by patients.
Evercore ISI analyst Vijay Kumar wrote Wednesday that one potential strategic rationale could be that both companies have sales teams focused on general practitioners, and that their combined sales team would be the largest focused on those doctors.
Earlier this month, Exact Sciences reported the result of a study of its liver blood test, called Oncoguard, which it said showed that the test worked better than the standard of care test for hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer.
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November 19, 2025 16:27 ET (21:27 GMT)
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