22 March 2016 - Last week GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced that its CEO, Sir Andrew Witty, would be stepping down from his post in early 2017. As outlined by the Financial Times, his tenure at GSK has been turbulent. Nowhere has that been more evident than in his stance on drug pricing.

His concerns that the high drug prices in the U.S. aren’t sustainable have led GSK away from producing drugs to treat cancer and rare disease drugs. Instead, Witty has repositioned GSK’s portfolio to one made up of high-volume businesses. This was most evident in 2014 when GSK traded its cancer drug business to Novartis in exchange for the latter’s vaccine and consumer health care businesses. As described by Andrew Ward of the Financial Times: “Just as peers such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck & Co. were soaring in value on the back of breakthroughs in oncology, GSK was reducing its exposure in pharma in favor of low-margin toothpaste and nicotine patches.”

There is no doubt that Witty’s concerns about drug pricing are justified. Every day a new story appears in the press on this topic, exacerbated by U.S. presidential campaign rhetoric as well as the biopharmaceutical industry’s poor reputation. But pulling GSK’s efforts from these important areas of medical need is not the answer.

For more details, go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2016/03/22/what-gsk-ceo-andrew-witty-doesnt-get-about-drug-pricing/#17374a270fed