What's Gilead­'s next deal go­ing to look like? CEO Mil­li­gan cites block­buster fil­go­tinib pact

Gilead to­day man­aged to sur­prise the an­a­lysts who fol­low the com­pa­ny by guid­ing down on its shrink­ing rev­enue for its megablock­buster hep C fran­chise. But af­ter they chewed on that awhile, the ques­tions on the Mon­day evening call turned to a fa­vorite top­ic: What will Gilead $GILD buy next?

Here’s CEO John Mil­li­gan’s care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed, if some­what long­wind­ed, re­sponse:

With re­gard to busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, ob­vi­ous­ly we are a com­pa­ny that has been open about be­ing in­ter­est­ed in do­ing more deals, es­pe­cial­ly deals of a cer­tain size where we think we can get some lever­age and use our or­ga­ni­za­tion to ef­fec­tive­ly ac­cel­er­ate or ex­pand in­di­ca­tions. We’ve done some good deals both with Gala­pa­gos…and we’re very in­ter­est­ed in con­tin­u­ing that and add more things to our pipeline, es­pe­cial­ly in the non-an­tivi­ral area where we con­tin­ue to see growth in fran­chis­es. It’s our hope that as we ex­it this year we’ll have a bet­ter, more com­plete sto­ry of pro­grams in­ter­nal­ly and ex­ter­nal­ly we can use to talk about why long-term prospects for growth are as good as we be­lieve they are and thus will be fo­cused on.

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