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GSK is nearing a $1bn deal to buy a US biotech developing a treatment for rare gastrointestinal tumours, as the UK drugmaker races to expand its oncology business.
The UK group is in advanced talks to buy privately owned biotech IDRx, which has venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and RA Capital as well as private equity giant Blackstone among its backers, according to people close to the discussions. The biotech, which was last valued at $430mn at a funding round in August, could be sold for as much as $1bn, the people added.
The sale is likely to be announced ahead of the JPMorgan healthcare conference in San Francisco next week, where a flurry of biotech deals are typically unveiled, the people said, but they added that negotiations were ongoing and the deal could fall through or another buyer could emerge.
GSK declined to comment.
IDRx is conducting early-stage trials of its targeted therapy for patients with a type of cancer called gastrointestinal stromal tumour, or Gist, which affects between 4,000 and 6,000 people each year in the US.
The available treatments for Gist are not very effective because of resistance mutations in the cancer in 80 per cent of cases. IDRx’s experimental drug has shown early signs of addressing this problem.
In a phase-one trial on patients that had already tried two other treatments that had stopped working, the IDRx drug stopped their tumours from growing for 12.9 months.
An acquisition of IDRx would help GSK to expand its oncology business, which is smaller than that of rivals such as Merck and AstraZeneca.
The UK drugmaker has prioritised bolt-on acquisitions of about $1bn, in part because it has a smaller deals budget than many of its peers. But is it also in line with current industry trends: in 2024, most pharma groups eschewed larger deals in favour of smaller acquisitions.
Sales of cancer drugs at GSK increased 94 per cent year on year to more than $1bn in the first three quarters of 2024. This included a contribution from the drug Ojjaara, which the company acquired as part of its $1.7bn purchase of Sierra Oncology in 2022.
This year, GSK is hoping to restore another drug, Blenrep, for a type of blood cancer, to the US market, after it voluntarily withdrew the treatment in 2022 because it failed to beat rivals in a trial.
GSK announced new results for the drug in November, reporting “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” effects for Blenrep when it was used with another established treatment.
In oncology, GSK has been building a portfolio of “antibody drug conjugates”, a new type of chemotherapy that aims to kill cancerous cells while sparing healthy ones. Late last year, it signed a deal worth up to $975mn with Shanghai-based Duality Bio for an antibody drug conjugate to treat gastrointestinal cancer, its third ADC deal in 18 months.
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