Less than 24 hours after inking a $1bn licensing deal with Frontier BioSciences, GSK has agreed to acquire Canadian biotech company, 35Pharma.
In exchange for $950m in cash at closing, GSK will absorb 100% of 35Pharma’s equity, while gaining access to its clinical and investigational new drug (IND)-stage assets for the treatment of cardiopulmonary diseases, heart failure and obesity.
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The jewel in 35Pharma’s crown is its lead asset, HS235, which is designed to treat pulmonary hypertension (PH). The therapy, which GSK touts as a “potential best-in-class” medicine in this indication, has already been investigated in a Phase I trial in healthy volunteers who are overweight or with obesity (NCT06714825).
HS235 acts by selectively inhibiting activins and growth differentiation factors (GDFs) associated with PH pathology – employing a similar mechanism to MSD’s blockbuster PH therapy, Winrevair (sotatercept).
Potentially building on Winrevair’s safety profile, which includes a label warning for severe bleeding events, HS235 is designed to reduce binding to bone morphogenetic proteins 9 and 10 (BMP9 and 10) – both of which have been seen to drive negative treatment effects like bleeding and blood vessel breakage. According to GSK, HS235’s enhanced selectivity could address current PH treatment limitations.
Alongside HS235’s possible safety perks, GSK’s CSO, Tony Wood, also touted the drug’s potential to offer “metabolic benefits clinically relevant to PH patients”, ranging from fat-driven weight loss, preservation of lean mass and improved insulin sensitivity to reductions in inflammation and fat hormones.
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By GlobalDataGSK notes that these factors could improve the drug’s “clinical and commercial value”, as it is currently estimated that 30-40% of patients with PH are reported as obese.
Further studies on HS235 in both PH caused by heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (PH-HfpEF) and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) are set to start imminently.
GSK will also gain access to HS370, an Activin x GDF trap designed to treat heart failure and obesity. This drug is currently in the IND-enabling stage of development.
GSK doubles down on deals
GSK’s acquisition of 35Pharma rides closely on the coattails of several deals the company has made to bolster its therapeutic pipeline – including a $1bn, silent interfering RNA (siRNA)-focused licensing agreement with Frontier BioSciences made less than 24 hours beforehand.
Alongside these deals, GSK added food allergy candidate, ozureprubart, to its list of investigative assets through its $2.2bn takeover of RAPT Therapeutics.
The UK-based pharma has also employed a dealmaking strategy to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in recent times. An example of this is its $50m, five-year collaboration deal with Noetik, in which GSK will harness the latter’s machine learning (ML) technology to develop cancer treatments. This move follows a wider industry trend towards the technology’s use across everything from drug development to manufacturing and clinical trial operations.
GSK’s dealmaking spree comes as the company looks to offset the impact of upcoming patent expiries within its portfolio.
