After entering 2026 hungry for deals, Gilead Sciences has wasted no time eating its fill. Having swallowed CAR-T company Arcellx, T-cell engager-focused Ouro Medicines and antibody drug-conjugate (ADC) biotech Tubulis over just six weeks, the biopharma is now focused on digesting its acquisitions.
“Recognizing the pace of business development activity over the last few months, we expect to take some time now to focus on integration activities and more ordinary course business development transactions,” Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day explained in a call with investors yesterday afternoon.
O’Day and other Gilead execs spoke glowingly of their recent pickups and the current outlook for the pharma's portfolio, which Chief Medical Officer Dietmar Berger, M.D., Ph.D., called “the most robust and differentiated pipeline in the company's history.”
“The quality of Gilead’s pipeline has never been stronger,” O’Day agreed on the April 7 call, which bookended a day that began with the announcement of the Arcellx buyout.
Arcellx, Ouro and Tubulis all met the “high bar” that Gilead set for acquisitions, according to O’Day, echoing what the CEO previously told reporters at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January.
In the frontloaded deal for German biotech Tubulis, the company sees potential for the $3.15 billion upfront payment to be clawed back through the value of its lead ADC asset, TUB-040, in ovarian cancer alone, Chief Financial Officer Andrew Dickinson explained during the call.
But Gilead sounded jazzed by the rest of Tubulis’ platform as well, with plans for the biotech to morph into a dedicated ADC research unit based in Munich.
“The Tubulis team and scientific expertise are central to the value of this acquisition,” a Gilead spokesperson told Fierce. “Gilead is committed to supporting Tubulis employees and enabling teams to continue advancing their science within a global oncology organization.”
Tubulis’ ADC tech is built on novel linkers that the company has developed, known as P5 and Alco5. Berger explained to investors that this will enable Gilead to bring “entirely new classes of payloads into the mix.”
“Ovarian cancer and then other areas in oncology are the other first direction, but there is real opportunity to build out and move into inflammation and into virology,” Berger said.
While the Tubulis buy gives Gilead a promising ovarian cancer asset and a platform to go with it, the gem of the pharma’s March acquisition of Ouro was a bispecific T-cell engager with “pipeline-in-a-product” potential.
Ouro’s lead asset, called OM336 or gamgertamig, is designed to bind to both BCMA and CD3 on the surface of B cells, and Gilead hopes the antibody could provide a “reset” of the immune system to treat a swath of autoimmune conditions.
“We think it's a really well-differentiated asset with a lot of potential across the board in different B and plasma cell-driven diseases,” Berger said on the call, highlighting a case study of two patients with a refractory autoimmune disease published last year.
Based on that report and other data, Berger added, Gilead hopes to launch a registrational trial of OM336 as early as next year.
Though Gilead has offered $1.67 billion in upfront cash for Ouro and OM336, the plan is for Belgian biopharma Galapagos—which Gilead owns a 25% stake in—to ultimately contribute half of the money as well as provide a home for Ouro.
The first of Gilead’s trio of acquisitions this year was probably the least surprising of them all. In February, the Bay Area pharma absorbed longtime partner Arcellx for $7.8 billion. The aim is to streamline the launch of next-gen CAR-T cell therapy, anito-cel, which Gilead and Arcellx developed together and is awaiting an approval decision from the FDA for multiple myeloma.
Acquiring Arcellx “allows us to move with speed, both in the initial launches, but also, very importantly, as we expand into the earlier lines of therapy,” CEO O’Day said during Tuesday's call.
The decision to pull the trigger and make Arcellx a part of Gilead came as the company recognized it was “at the right point of the risk continuum” for anito-cel, O’Day explained. With the application for approval already filed, anito-cel was also coming off the back of a strong showing at the American Society of Hematology meeting in December.
The move was partly driven by a desire to fully take advantage of Arcellx’s D-Domain platform, which O’Day said has potential in other cancers and disease areas as well.
Cindy Perettie, who heads up Gilead's Kite Pharma cell therapy subsidiary, explained on the call that these D-Domain binders could come into play in Gilead’s well-documented pursuit of in vivo CAR-T therapies, as well as the up-and-coming T-cell engager platform from Ouro.
You got a friend in me
Two of Gilead’s three recent acquisitions, Tubulis and Arcellx, were partners with the pharma before being bought, a fact that did not go unnoticed by analysts on the Tuesday call.
“You really prioritize doing a broad set of collaborations and partnerships,” Leerink Partners analyst Daina Graybosch, Ph.D., pointed out during the call’s Q&A. “What makes a partner acquirable versus making more sense to continue the partnership or collaboration?”
For Gilead, O’Day replied, it all depends on the science.
“There is no one-size-fits-all for how those partnerships will eventually evolve,” the CEO said. For Tubulis, Gilead saw that the German biotech’s team possessed “complementary skill sets on a scientific level.”
“We felt that by combining the two companies, we get the best of both worlds,” O’Day added. “This does not mean that every partner that we have ends up with an acquisition.”
Despite O’Day’s words, analysts will likely be keeping a close eye on Gilead’s other partners moving forward. Some of them, like Aspen Neuroscience, have cell therapies that could entice Kite, while others, like Leo Pharma, represent a potential easy on-ramp to the inflammation market, another area of focus for Gilead.