On February 23, 2026, Gilead agreed to acquire Arcellx in a deal valued at up to $7.8 billion—a headline number that’s easy to file under “Big Pharma goes shopping.” But that framing misses the more interesting story: this isn’t just an acquisition. It’s a conversion—from collaboration to control—at the exact moment a drug program stops being a scientific hypothesis and starts behaving like an asset with a measurable probability curve.
In other words: this is what it looks like when a company exercises an option—except the underlying “stock” isn’t a ticker. It’s a BCMA-directed CAR-T therapy called anito-cel (anitocabtagene autoleucel),
