Just a few months after Eli Lilly's (NYSE:LLY) $6.5 billion acquisition of ImClone Systems, the company's CEO John Lechleiter said that he was looking for acquisitions of up to $15 billion, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Lechleiter was quoted in the article as saying, "I got hungry again about three weeks after ImClone got closed." Lechleiter's comments come in the wake of a wave of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry as companies try to cope with a rapidly deteriorating economic environment by diversifying the products they offer. Other M&A activity in the industry included Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) acquiring Wyeth (NYSE:WYE) for $68 billion in January, Merck (NYSE:MRK) merging with Schering-Plough Corp. (NYSE:SGP) and Roche Holdings acquiring the remaining shares of Genentech (NYSE:DNA) that it hadn't already owned.

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