GSK is sustaining its streak of bolt-on acquisitions, announcing Tuesday it will pay $11 billion to buy Nuvalent, a Massachusetts-based biotechnology company with two cancer medicines under Food and Drug Administration review.
With the buyout, GSK plans to use the two drugs to build a franchise of lung cancer treatments that can expand further should a dual-acting therapy the London-based company is developing also gain approval.
Nuvalent’s drugs under review are intended to treat people with lung cancer whose tumors express mutations called ROS1 and ALK, respectively. While drugs like Xalkori have been on the market for years treating patients with these mutations, Nuvalent has sought to develop alternatives that provide a more durable response without resistance and have fewer side effects.
“Today’s acquisition is a multi-product deal, consistent with our approach to acquire assets that have clinically proven targets and meaningfully address an efficacy and/or tolerability gap,” said Luke Miels, GSK’s CEO, in a statement.
Per deal terms, GSK will pay Nuvalent investors $124 a share, a 40% premium to Monday’s close and 26% more than the average price over the past 30 days. Nuvalent’s shares had been under pressure for the past week, since trial data presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology on a competing drug, Pfizer’s Lobrena, showed a majority of patients who got it survived seven years without their disease progressing.
GSK will fund the deal through new and existing debt, which will not affect its credit rating nor its guidance or dividend payouts. It expects the deal to be profitable beginning in 2027, and will be “incremental” to GSK’s goal of achieving 40 billion pounds in sales a year by 2031.
The deal is GSK’s third acquisition of 2026, in which it has spent a total of nearly $14 billion on bigger-ticket transactions, according to BioPharma Dive data. It is also GSK’s biggest of the past eight years and is more than double that of the next-largest, the buyout of Tesaro, which gave GSK the cancer drugs Zejula and Jemperli.
The two Nuvalent drugs are called zidesamtinib and neladalkib. The former targets ROS1 and is due an FDA approval decision by Sept. 18 in people whose non-small cell lung cancer progressed after treatment with another ROS1 inhibitor. The latter, an ALK inhibitor, should have an FDA approval decision by Nov. 27. It’s meant to treat people who’ve gotten worse even after receiving another ALK-targeting drug.
Should they gain approval, GSK is hoping those drugs will pave the way for another medicine called risvutatug rezetecan, which is in development for small cell lung cancer.
In a client note, Stifel analyst Laura Prendergast wrote that the deal is “optimal for realizing the full potential of zidesamtinib and neladalkib” because of GSK’s sales and marketing capabilities.
However, she added that the timing of the deal came as a surprise to some investors, who expected bidders to wait until after launch, when the commercial outlook was clearer and data for both drugs in first-line treatment was nearer or available.
