Daniel O’Day has been CEO of Gilead Sciences for less than two months, and he’s already shaking things up.
Since leaving Roche as CEO of its pharmaceuticals business and taking over the top spot at Gilead Sciences, effective March 1, 2019, Daniel O’Day has been making plans and has a lot of changes in store for the company.
Some of those changes have to do with Gilead’s Kite business, which it acquired in 2017, paying $12 billion for CAR-T cell technologies, including Yescarta, one of the first of these therapies to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. O’Day plans to hire a new CEO and operate Kite as a separate business unit. So far, Kite hasn’t met analyst expectations for revenue, but O’Day expects that to change soon. He believes giving the business more autonomy will enable it to function more effectively, making it more agile and improving investor perceptions.
Another priority for O’Day is expanding Gilead’s pipeline through appropriate mergers and acquisitions. The company is particularly focused on targets with attractive late-stage pipelines in its areas of expertise, which include oncology, HIV, hepatitis B and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. It is also interested in bolt-on acquisitions that can help accelerate its own internal candidate development.