In January, Exact Sciences CEO Kevin Conroy told us that 2025 was shaping up to be a transformative year for the diagnostics company. Three cancer test launches, multiple study readouts and one $23 billion acquisition offer later—the largest in the sector to date—he was right.
Abbott announced Thursday that it has signed up to buy Exact, the maker of the Cologuard at-home screening test for colorectal cancer and new blood-based tests for detecting multiple tumors in their early stages and spotting the recurrence of malignancies after treatment.
The purchase represents a whole new vertical segment for Abbott and a big step for a company historically reserved when it comes to M&A deals. The additions of cancer screening and precision oncology to its diagnostics portfolio are slated to double the business’s total addressable market to more than $120 billion—with Abbott estimating that about 20 million people worldwide, including 2 million in the U.S., receive a cancer diagnosis each year.
“We’ve been looking, over the last year, at the best ways for us to enter this … and we thought Exact was the perfect company to combine forces with,” Abbott CEO Robert Ford said on a call with investors Thursday. “Quite frankly, I’ve been very impressed by them, by their team, by their products and by their go-to-market strategy. I see them as a very unique company in this space.”
“Their revenue is accelerating, and it's not just the new products that are being launched—even the existing products and iterations of these existing technologies are seeing revenue acceleration,” Ford added.
Exact is expected to generate about $3.2 billion in revenue this year, with more than 5 million tests being performed and the vast majority of the business being located within the U.S.
The acquisition deal shakes out to $105 per share in cash, with an estimated enterprise value of $23 billion and a total equity value of about $21 billion after accounting for Exact Sciences’ $1.8 billion of debt. Abbott said it would fund the buyout with a combination of money on hand plus debt financing, and it expects to see about $100 million in annual synergies after the transaction closes in the second quarter of 2026.
“But beyond the numbers, this is also about impact, and this acquisition positions Abbott at the forefront of the next era in diagnostics—one that is more preventative, predictive and personalized,” said Ford. “The technologies developed by Exact Sciences help answer the three most critical questions in cancer diagnostics: Do I have cancer? What is the best treatment for my cancer? And is my cancer in remission?”
After the deal is finalized, Abbott said that Exact Sciences—which currently counts about 7,000 employees—will maintain its presence in Madison, Wisconsin, with Conroy staying on through the transition in an advisory role.
While Cologuard first made its debut more than a decade ago, Exact Sciences began rolling out Cologuard Plus this past spring. The updated version adds new genetic biomarkers to the stool DNA test to help improve its accuracy.
In liquid biopsy, the company later raised the curtain on Cancerguard, which works to detect more than 50 different types of cancer by sifting through DNA fragments found in a single blood draw. That test does not search for breast or prostate cancer, but it aims to spot the signs of tumors that represent more than 80% of the new diagnoses handed out each year in the U.S. to older adults—including aggressive diseases with few screening options such as cancers of the pancreas, ovaries, liver, lungs, esophagus and stomach.
Meanwhile, Oncodetect is designed to track minimal residual disease following therapy and surgery by seeking up to 200 variants in genetic material floating through the bloodstream that has been matched with the patient’s tumor.
Exact Sciences also provides the Oncotype DX tests for guiding the treatment of breast and colon cancers as well as the Oncoguard blood test for liver cancer. Elsewhere, it has been developing capsule-on-a-string tests to check for esophageal cancer.