This blog is another installment in a series, Innovations Advanced by M&A, that underscores the unique role of mergers and acquisitions in promoting a competitive and innovative life sciences ecosystem for patients. You can find previous blogs in this series here.
In America’s life sciences industry, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a crucial engine for turning promising scientific discoveries into approved medicines for patients. Bringing a new treatment or cure from lab to patient is a long, costly and challenging process – and often no one company can do it alone.
One example is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s 2022 acquisition of Sierra Oncology. Sierra Oncology was founded in San Mateo, California in 2003, with a dedicated focus on targeted therapies for rare hematologic cancers, such as myelofibrosis.
Myelofibrosis is a rare and serious blood cancer. Nearly all patients with myelofibrosis develop anemia and require blood transfusions. Anemia is a leading cause of myelofibrosis treatment discontinuation, with more than 30% of patients discontinuing treatment due to its severity, which then results in worse outcomes and decreased survival. Sierra’s lead asset, momelotinib (Ojjaara), showed promise in addressing this unmet medical need through a new mechanism of action, which could treat myelofibrosis while reducing the risk of anemia.
Even with a promising treatment candidate, Sierra required a more experienced partner to help navigate the regulatory approval process and bring this promising discovery to patients at scale. To achieve this, Sierra engaged in an acquisition by GSK.
“Uniting with GSK creates the best opportunity for Sierra Oncology to realise its mission of delivering targeted therapies that treat rare forms of cancer while also delivering compelling and certain value for our stockholders. Now we have a partner with a global infrastructure and oncology expertise that enables us to deliver momelotinib to patients as quickly as possible and on a global scale.” – Stephen Dilly, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sierra Oncology
This acquisition combined Sierra’s specialization in developing targeting therapies for rare blood cancers with GSK’s global scale, regulatory experience and commercialization capabilities. The following year, the FDA approved Ojjaara (momelotinib) as the only first-line medicine to treat myelofibrosis patients who have anemia.
“Momelotinib offers a differentiated treatment option that could address the significant unmet medical needs of myelofibrosis patients with anaemia, the major reason patients discontinue treatment. With this proposed acquisition, we have the opportunity to potentially bring meaningful new benefits to patients and further strengthen our portfolio of specialty medicines.” – Luke Miels, Chief Commercial Officer, GSK
This example highlights how life sciences M&A allows companies of all sizes to partner and combine their complementary resources and expertise, ultimately increasing the chance of bringing a new medical breakthrough to patients. This is reinforced by recent empirical research, which finds that drugs in development that undergo M&A between a large and small firm are:
- Five times more likely to launch as novel drugs that fill an unmet medical need and,
- Nearly 24 times more likely to launch with a new mechanism of action, representing a treatment with an entirely new way of treating a disease.
Policymakers must recognize this reality and preserve the vital role of M&A in sustaining innovation, competition and growth in America’s life sciences industry.