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GSK is close to completing a billion-dollar deal to buy a US biotech company developing a treatment for rare gastrointestinal tumors, as the British pharmaceutical maker strives to expand its oncology business.
The British group is in advanced talks to buy private biotech company IDRx, which counts venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and RA Capital as well as private equity giant Blackstone among its backers, according to people familiar with the discussions. The biotech, which was last valued at $430 million in an August funding round, could be sold for as much as $1 billion, the sources added.
The sale is expected to be announced before the JPMorgan health care conference in San Francisco next week, where a host of biotech deals are typically unveiled, the sources said, but they added that negotiations were ongoing and that the The deal could fall through or another buyer could. emerge.
GSK declined to comment. IDRx did not immediately respond to request for comment.
IDRx is conducting early-stage trials of its targeted treatment for patients with a type of cancer called gastrointestinal stromal tumor, or Gist, which affects between 4,000 and 6,000 people each year in the United States.
Available treatments for Gist are not very effective due to cancer resistance mutations in 80 percent of cases. IDRx’s experimental drug has shown early signs of a solution to this problem.
In a phase one trial of patients who had already tried two other treatments that stopped working, the drug IDRx stopped the growth of their tumors for 12.9 months.
An acquisition of IDRx would help GSK expand its oncology business, which is smaller than those of rivals such as Merck and AstraZeneca.
The British pharmaceutical maker has prioritized targeted acquisitions worth around $1 billion, in part because it has a smaller deal budget than most of its peers. But is it also in line with current industry trends: in 2024, most pharmaceutical groups avoided larger contracts in favor of small acquisitions.
Sales of cancer drugs at GSK increased 94% year-on-year to more than $1 billion in the first three quarters of 2024. This includes a contribution from the drug Ojjaara, which the company acquired as part of her Buying Sierra Oncology for $1.7 billion in 2022.
This year, GSK hopes to reinstate another drug, Blenrep, for a type of blood cancer, on the U.S. market, after voluntarily withdrawing the treatment in 2022 because it failed to beat competitors in a essay.
GSK announced new results for the drug in November, reporting “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” effects for Blenrep when used with another established treatment.
In oncology, GSK has built a portfolio of “antibody-drug conjugates”, a new type of chemotherapy that aims to kill cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. Late last year, it signed a deal worth up to $975 million with Shanghai-based Duality Bio for an antibody-drug conjugate to treat gastrointestinal cancer, its third deal ADC in 18 months.
