At a J.P. Morgan media event Tuesday, the Gilead C-suite seemed to be walking on air as they highlighted Yeztugo’s capture of the HIV market and its plans for business development.
Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day was downright ebullient on Tuesday morning. “I remember when we were in our small room last year, we knew it wasn’t going to be a quiet year,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. And guess what? It kind of overdelivered.”
The spirits for O’Day and his fellow Gilead executives were, like for many at the conference and the city itself, sunny—coming off a presentation that showed increasing payer coverage of the company’s new HIV drug Yeztugo. The company’s initial goal was 90% coverage within a year of its June 2025 approval. At six months, coverage is at 85%.
“Yeztugo launch shows no signs of slowing,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman wrote in an investor note late Monday, noting that the drug also hit its revenue guidance of $150 million for 2025.
Chief Commercial Officer Johanna Mercier echoed the good vibes, noting at the media event that many of Yeztugo’s patients in the second and third quarter of 2025 were new to Gilead.
“Then they come back for a second injection [of Yeztugo], then there are returning patients,” Mercier said. “That’s why we believe there’s strong growth ahead.”
Reaching More HIV Patients
O’Day also used strong language to discuss the drug’s effects.
“We’re not afraid to use the word ‘cure,’” O’Day said at the event. “When you’re a company that’s cured a disease and on the verge of ending an epidemic, you’re kind of bold about your aspirations.”
Gilead is not facing an impending patent cliff for any of its main moneymakers for at least another decade, according to O’Day. Gilead is being loose with its patents anyway, voluntarily licensing lenacapivir, the active ingredient in Yeztugo, to six generics companies to improve access in a spate of low-income countries.
“We’re the first company to do voluntary licensing of a medicine,” O’Day said. “There was a dogma in the industry: you couldn’t do that.”
With its HIV business, Mercier said there was work to do in reaching new markets and patients. Internal figures showed that somewhere between 70–80% of patients starting on its other HIV PrEP drug Descovy were white men who have sex with men.
Gilead is drawing up tailored social media and advertising—and potentially direct-to-consumer marketing in the future— “microtargeting” Black and Latino men living in the U.S. south, Mercier said.
Aspirations
Outside of HIV, Gilead’s aspirations are multiplying. When it was pointed out that in 2020 Gilead spent upwards of $27 billion to bulk out its oncology pipeline just to end up with one approved drug from that investment—antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Trodelvy, which brought in $1.3 billion in 2024—O’Day didn’t blanch. Gilead is looking at multiple label expansions, including into first-line metastatic triple-negative breast cancer potentially in 2026 after positive results from two ASCENT trials. The company is also eyeing first-line metastatic non-small cell lung cancer in 2027, following anticipated EVOKE-03 data coming in the second quarter of 2026.
To O’Day and the rest of the Gilead C-suite gathered at JPM this week, that business development investment was worth it, and the company is primed to continue. As far as business development is concerned, “we’re in a position of strength,” O’Day said. Chief Medical Officer Dietmar Berger said at the media event that he wants to point the company in the direction of developing, internally or externally, positions in ADCs and bispecifics to improve its cancer portfolio.
CFO Andrew Dickinson, on the company’s third quarter 2025 earnings call, had suggested that the company was looking for M&A to bulk out a number of areas, highlighting an interest in its liver disease pipeline. Gilead has already reaped rewards from purchases in the liver space, winning accelerated approval for its liver inflammation drug Livdelzi in 2024, picked up in the $4.3 billion acquisition of CymaBay Therapeutics earlier in the year.
But the liver disease biotech space is relatively sparse, and a deal might not come for some time, Dickinson said Tuesday morning. “We have the luxury of being selective.”
