Here’s the in­side ac­count of Gilead­'s 11-week sprint to its $12B Kite buy­out

What start­ed as a ca­su­al dal­liance be­tween ex­ec­u­tives at Gilead and Kite in 2015 marked by some oc­ca­sion­al flir­ta­tion over head-turn­ing tech­nol­o­gy turned se­ri­ous ear­ly this year, prob­a­bly at JP Mor­gan, as two top deal­mak­ers — Gilead’s An­drew Dick­in­son and Kite’s He­len Kim — de­cid­ed to see if they should get se­ri­ous about a union of the two biotechs.

By mid-June the two CEOs, John Mil­li­gan and Arie Bellde­grun, got in­to the act. And over the next 11 weeks the over­ture turned pas­sion­ate enough for Mil­li­gan and Gilead to up their ini­tial of­fer by about $5 bil­lion.

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