JPM26: Gilead Captures Sunny JPM Temper With Yeztugo Numbers, HIV Vibes

Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day was downright ebullient on Tuesday morning. “I bear in mind after we had been in our small room final 12 months, we knew it wasn’t going to be a quiet 12 months,” he informed reporters on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Convention. And guess what? It sort of overdelivered.”

The spirits for O’Day and his fellow Gilead executives had been, like for a lot of on the convention and town itself, sunny—coming off a presentation that confirmed rising payer protection of the corporate’s new HIV drug Yeztugo. The corporate’s preliminary objective was 90% protection inside a 12 months of its June 2025 approval. At six months, protection is at 85%.

“Yeztugo launch reveals no indicators of slowing,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman wrote in an investor word late Monday, noting that the drug additionally hit its income steerage of $150 million for 2025.

Chief Business Officer Johanna Mercier echoed the great vibes, noting on the media occasion that a lot of Yeztugo’s sufferers within the second and third quarter of 2025 had been new to Gilead.

“Then they arrive again for a second injection [of Yeztugo], then there are returning sufferers,” Mercier mentioned. “That’s why we imagine there’s robust progress forward.”

Reaching Extra HIV Sufferers

O’Day additionally used robust language to debate the drug’s results.

“We’re not afraid to make use of the phrase ‘remedy,’” O’Day mentioned on the occasion. “While you’re an organization that’s cured a illness and on the verge of ending an epidemic, you’re sort of daring about your aspirations.”

Gilead just isn’t dealing with an impending patent cliff for any of its principal moneymakers for at the very least one other decade, based on O’Day. Gilead is being unfastened with its patents anyway, voluntarily licensing lenacapivir, the energetic ingredient in Yeztugo, to 6 generics corporations to enhance entry in a spate of low-income international locations.

“We’re the primary firm to do voluntary licensing of a medication,” O’Day mentioned. “There was a dogma within the business: you couldn’t do this.”

With its HIV enterprise, Mercier mentioned there was work to do in reaching new markets and sufferers. Inner figures confirmed that someplace between 70–80% of sufferers beginning on its different HIV PrEP drug Descovy had been white males who’ve intercourse with males.

Gilead is drawing up tailor-made social media and promoting—and doubtlessly direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing sooner or later— “microtargeting” Black and Latino males residing within the U.S. south, Mercier mentioned.

Aspirations

Outdoors of HIV, Gilead’s aspirations are multiplying. When it was identified that in 2020 Gilead spent upwards of $27 billion to bulk out its oncology pipeline simply to finish up with one accredited drug from that funding—antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Trodelvy, which introduced in $1.3 billion in 2024—O’Day didn’t blanch. Gilead is taking a look at a number of label expansions, together with into first-line metastatic triple-negative breast most cancers doubtlessly in 2026 after constructive outcomes from two ASCENT trials. The corporate can also be eyeing first-line metastatic non-small cell lung most cancers in 2027, following anticipated EVOKE-03 information coming within the second quarter of 2026.

To O’Day and the remainder of the Gilead C-suite gathered at JPM this week, that enterprise improvement funding was price it, and the corporate is primed to proceed. So far as enterprise improvement is anxious, “we’re ready of power,” O’Day mentioned. Chief Medical Officer Dietmar Berger mentioned on the media occasion that he desires to level the corporate within the route of growing, internally or externally, positions in ADCs and bispecifics to enhance its most cancers portfolio.

CFO Andrew Dickinson, on the firm’s third quarter 2025 earnings name, had instructed that the corporate was in search of M&A to bulk out various areas, highlighting an curiosity in its liver illness pipeline. Gilead has already reaped rewards from purchases within the liver area, profitable accelerated approval for its liver irritation drug Livdelzi in 2024, picked up within the $4.3 billion acquisition of CymaBay Therapeutics earlier within the 12 months.

However the liver illness biotech area is comparatively sparse, and a deal won’t come for a while, Dickinson mentioned Tuesday morning. “We now have the luxurious of being selective.”