Luke Miels had only been at the helm of GSK for 20 days before he signed off on his first multibillion-dollar buyout, and the CEO is clear on what else will attract his interest.
“The basic framework that we like for [business development] is in that 2-to-4 billion [dollar] range,” Miels told journalists on a fourth-quarter earnings call this morning.
“Typically, we like a program where the science is reasonably established,” he added.
Miels—who served as GSK’s chief commercial officer before taking over from CEO Emma Walmsley in the new year—pointed to a pattern in dealmaking set in 2022 by the $1.9 billion acquisition of Sierra Oncology for its near-approval cancer drug.
GSK is especially interested in drugs where “we’ve got a degree of validation on the science, but there are liabilities with the existing products,” he said.
To demonstrate these criteria, Miels cited the $2.2 billion buyout of Rapt Therapeutics just days into his tenure as CEO. Rapt’s IgE antibody ozureprubart protects against food allergy reactions by targeting the same epitope as Novartis and Roche’s Xolair.
Miels admitted that Xolair has “absolutely exploded in the U.S. for usage with severe allergies, particularly in kids.”
“But the problem is there’s a very complicated dosing regimen, and these kids have to inject themselves every two weeks,” he explained.
“[Ozureprubart] works exactly the same way as Xolair, except that you give it on a much lower frequency,” Miels said.
“So that’s essentially the methodology we’re going to follow with [business development]—looking for assets [that are] well priced, not necessarily in the mainstream, hiding in plain sight,” the CEO added. “And we’ll do that with a degree of frequency, which, again, will help us build out the late-stage portfolio.”
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GSK confirmed to Fierce this week that changes to its R&D workforce would see initially fewer than 50 workers in the U.K. laid off along with fewer than 70 staffers in the U.S. The ultimate number of job losses is still subject to change as the reorganization is finalized, but no more than 350 jobs total will be affected, the company said Monday.
When asked by Fierce this morning whether GSK is considering more significant layoffs or pulling back from certain disease areas down the line, Miels would only that say that running a “dynamic” company means GSK will “need to move resources and people to map where the opportunities are.”
“To move them there, they have to come from somewhere else,” he told Fierce. “So again, that’s a healthy thing, and I think our shareholders would expect us to do that.”
The U.K.-based Big Pharma used its fourth-quarter earnings update to disclose a couple of changes to its pipeline. They included confirmation that GSK5101955, a 24-valent pneumococcal vaccine for children, was being removed from phase 2 development.
That vaccine was acquired as part of the $2.1 billion buyout of Affinivax in 2022, but the loss of GSK5101955 won’t have come as a complete surprise to keen GSK observers. In fact, the pharma outlined as far back as 2024 that it didn’t consider 24-valent vaccines to have a competitive edge. Instead, GSK has now taken Affinivax’s 30-plus-valent pneumococcal vaccine for adults into phase 1 trials.
The company also removed GSK3888130, an anti-IL7 antibody that had entered phase 1 studies for autoimmune diseases. A GSK spokesperson told Fierce it was “in the nature of drug discovery that we make the decision not to continue with some pipeline assets.”
