Abbott completes $21 billion purchase of Exact Sciences

Abbott completed its acquisition of Exact Sciences on 23 March 2026, making the cancer-screening company a wholly owned subsidiary. Exact Sciences shares traded on Nasdaq for the last time on 20 March ¹.

The deal was announced on 20 November 2025 at $105 a share in cash, an equity value of about $21 billion and an enterprise value of about $23 billion. At the time, Exact Sciences expected 2025 revenue of more than $3 billion and a "high teens organic sales growth rate" ².

What Abbott bought

Exact Sciences brings four products. Cologuard is "a market-leading noninvasive colorectal cancer screening option". Oncotype DX "informs personalized treatment decisions for patients with early-stage breast cancer". Oncodetect is "a tumor-informed molecular residual disease (MRD) test to help identify cancer recurrence and guide follow-up care". Cancerguard is "a multi-cancer early detection blood test" ¹.

Abbott puts the US cancer screening and precision oncology diagnostics segments at $60 billion ¹. Robert B. Ford, Abbott's chairman and chief executive, said: "Abbott's global scale, track record of operational and commercial excellence and work with healthcare systems around the world will expand access to important tools for early cancer detection and personalized treatments" ¹.

What it means for the market

Abbott's first-quarter results, published on 16 April 2026, give the first figures. Cancer Diagnostics, the new segment, recorded sales of $96 million in the days it belonged to Abbott, or $801 million on a comparable basis that includes Exact Sciences' prior-year sales, with comparable growth of 13.4%. Total Diagnostics sales were $2,180 million as reported and $2,810 million on a comparable basis ³.

For 2026 as a whole, Abbott guides to comparable sales growth of 6.5% to 7.5% and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $5.38 to $5.58, which includes $0.20 of dilution from the acquisition ³. At announcement, Exact Sciences said the deal would be "immediately accretive to Abbott's revenue growth and gross margin" ². Ford said in April that the acquisition "adds another high-growth business to the Abbott portfolio, further strengthening our confidence in delivering accelerating growth as we move through the year" ³.

For health systems and screening programmes, the four tests now belong to a group whose diagnostics sales alone were $2.8 billion in the quarter on a comparable basis ³, and Ford has said the intention is to use Abbott's relationships with health systems to widen access to them ¹. For competitors in colorectal screening and multi-cancer blood tests, a standalone rival with revenue above $3 billion has become part of that group ².

Abbott gave no revenue projection for Exact Sciences in its completion announcement ¹, and the first-quarter comparable figures include sales made before the deal closed ³. The $0.20 of dilution is Abbott's own estimate for 2026 ³.