When it comes to GSK’s new dealmaking strategy of trying to outdo established blockbusters, CEO Luke Miels has told Fierce that oncology may offer the most tempting targets.
Miels—who served as GSK’s chief commercial officer before taking over from former CEO Emma Walmsley in the new year—set out his approach to business development in his first earnings call in February. This involves finding areas where “the science is reasonably established” and aiming to improve on existing treatments.
In practice, this has meant the $2.2 billion buyout of Rapt Therapeutics for a food allergy reaction drug that targets the same epitope as Novartis and Roche’s Xolair, as well as paying $950 million cash for Canadian biotech 35Pharma and its potential rival to Merck & Co.’s pulmonary hypertension mainstay Winrevair.
On this morning’s first-quarter earnings call, Miels made clear that this strategy remains in place. But when pushed by Fierce on exactly what other blockbusters GSK now has in its sights, the CEO remained tight-lipped.
“I’d love to be more granular, but unfortunately I can’t,” he told Fierce on a press call April 29.
“The good news is there’s a number of areas … with established product mixes—so you’ve got products that are addressing a disease, but in a sub-optimal way,” he said. “I think, actually, there’s a lot of those in oncology.”
Beyond cancer, Miels namechecked both the cardiovascular and respiratory spaces as “intriguing.”
“We’d love to do more deals in vaccines, but there’s just not as much innovation in vaccines,” he added.
Miels reached back to an acquisition before his own tenure as CEO to illustrate the GSK gameplan. In early 2025, the company bought precision medicine biotech IDRx in a $1.15 billion deal for its phase 3-ready gastrointestinal cancer asset.
“You have an effective drug there in the form of a [Novartis’ Gleevec], a fantastic drug that’s changed outcomes for patients today,” Miels told Fierce. “But it actually creates escape mutations, and the solutions for patients are pretty toxic regimens.”
“And so that was an example where we were looking for something that not only blocked the escape mutations, but also was tolerated by patients,” the CEO added.
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Elsewhere on this morning’s call, Miels explained that his “main focus” since taking charge of the company has been “working very closely” with chief scientific officer Tony Wood, Ph.D., and head of global product strategy Nina Mojas, Ph.D., to “go through the whole portfolio and identify opportunities where we can accelerate either existing programs or there may have been additional indications where we could elect to bring those experiments forward.”
This focus resulted in the push forward for mocertatug rezetecan—a B7-H4-directed antibody-drug conjugate licensed from Hansoh Pharma—that GSK is now planning to launch into five late-stage trials over the next few months.
“When we looked at the profile of that product, the work that had been done by Hansoh, the activity we’re observing in patients with ovarian and endometrial cancer—it made a lot of sense to accelerate those programs and expand those programs,” Miels said.
