London — Doing things one at a time in drug development is not a luxury that GlaxoSmithKline can afford any longer, the head of pharmaceuticals at Britain’s largest drugmaker says.
GSK, like rivals, was in the habit of testing new drugs first on patients who had run out of other treatment options. If successful, it would try patients at an earlier stage of their disease, replacing older, established treatments. GSK, which is battling to return to profit growth, has taken this approach for instance with an experimental drug that for now goes by the code name of GSK’916 against multiple myeloma, a common and incurable type of blood cancer.