GSK plc (GSK) is making its biggest bet in more than a decade. On Tuesday, the British drugmaker agreed to buy Boston-based biotech Nuvalent, Inc. (Nuvalent) for $10.6 billion in cash, a move aimed at supercharging its lung cancer portfolio.
Under the deal, GSK will pay $124 for each Nuvalent share, a 40% premium over Monday's closing price of $88.49. Nuvalent shares shot up 38.7% to $122.76 in premarket trading as investors cheered the acquisition.
“The acquisition provides GSK with immediate new sales growth opportunities, improving profit contributions from 2027, and a platform in lung cancer…” said GSK CEO Luke Miels in a statement. The deal is GSK's second-largest acquisition ever and its biggest since it bought Human Genome Sciences for about $3.6 billion in 2012.
GSK expects the deal to start adding to revenue and core operating profit in 2027, with a boost to earnings per share coming in 2029.
What GSK Is Getting
The acquisition brings three lung cancer assets under one roof. The lead candidates are zidesamtinib and neladalkib, both being developed for certain forms of non-small cell lung cancer. There's also NVL-330, a Phase 1 HER2-targeted therapy, plus Nuvalent's broader oncology pipeline.
Nuvalent CEO James Porter framed the deal as a way to speed up delivery of new medicines: “By combining our highly differentiated pipeline with GSK's global development, commercial and operational capabilities, we have the opportunity to accelerate the delivery of important new medicines to patients around the world.”
Neladalkib has already shown promise. In November, Nuvalent reported a 31% response rate in previously treated patients with advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer. In a separate group of treatment-naive patients, the response rate hit 86%.
Pipeline Race Heats Up
The deal comes as big pharma companies scramble to fill their pipelines ahead of looming patent cliffs and rising competition. GSK has been pushing deeper into oncology under Miels. In April, the company reported encouraging early-stage data for its experimental cancer therapy Mo-rez.
And it's not just GSK. According to PitchBook, global biotech dealmaking has already hit $106 billion across 201 transactions so far in 2026, putting the sector on track for its strongest year since before the pandemic.
As for Nuvalent's stock performance before the deal, it had been a rough ride. Shares closed Monday at $88.49, down 2.7% for the session, and had fallen about 12.25% year-to-date and 15.82% over the past six months. Market data ranked Nuvalent in the 20.55th percentile for momentum, though the stock was showing positive price trends across short, medium, and long-term time frames.
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