When GSK’s new CEO Luke Miels told investors last month that “smart business development” is a key pillar for his strategy, he wasn’t lying. The British Big Pharma has just announced its second biotech acquisition in as many months, proving the company is willing to splash the cash for desirable assets.
This morning’s deal sees GSK pay $950 million cash for Canadian biotech 35Pharma. The real prize is HS235, a protein-based therapeutic that has already completed a phase 1 study in healthy volunteers and is poised to enter trials in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and pulmonary hypertension due to heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.
Like Merck & Co.’s PAH drug Winrevair—which brought in $1.4 billion last year—HS235 targets the activin receptor signaling pathway. However, GSK is hoping that its newly acquired asset will have the edge over Merck’s blockbuster by demonstrating it can also lower the risk of bleeding, improve insulin sensitivity and help patients lose weight while maintaining lean mass.
This is because HS235 is designed with enhanced selectivity in order to reduce binding to BMP9 and BMP10—ligands that are associated with adverse events like bleeding and broken blood vessels. Despite current PAH treatment options, a “significant proportion” of patients still require concomitant anticoagulant or antiplatelet therapy, GSK noted in its Feb. 25 release.
There is already some evidence to back up GSK’s hopes. When 35Pharma outlined its findings from the phase 1 study in December, the Montreal-based biotech noted that the drug produced dose-dependent decreases in visceral fat mass while preserving or increasing lean mass, as well as achieving deep and sustained target engagement.
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“HS235’s potential protective effects on vascular function, alongside potential benefits on fat-derived markers of metabolism and inflammation […] offer new development opportunities within our RI&I portfolio to achieve broader coverage across the metabolic, inflammatory, vascular and fibrotic drivers of multiple chronic diseases that affect the lung, liver and kidney,” GSK Chief Scientific Officer Tony Wood, Ph.D., said in the release.
This morning’s deal comes a month after GSK paid $2.2 billion for Rapt Therapeutics and its anti-immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibody to protect against food allergy reactions. Only yesterday, the U.K.-based pharma agreed to pay $40 million for a pair of oligonucleotides from China’s Frontier Biotechnologies.
The IgE antibody acquired via Rapt targets the same epitope as Novartis and Roche’s Xolair, and a similar strategy of trying to best an existing blockbuster can be seen this morning in HS235’s similarities to Merck’s Winrevair.
The flurry of recent deals in recent weeks also backs up the claims earlier this month of CEO Miels—who took over at the start of the year—that one of the company’s major priorities is to “accelerate what we have” in the pharma’s pipeline and “add to it via smart business development.”
“I can’t stress this enough for us, accelerating R&D is our biggest opportunity to create value as a company,” Miels told journalists on a Feb. 4 earnings call. “Each quarter you’ll hear more in detail about how we’re actually going to make this happen.”
