In our latest Q&A series, Gary Quashie, George Medicines’ Senior Director, Business Development, Licensing & Alliance Management, shares what drew him to the company, his guiding philosophy for building global partnerships and where Business Development is headed next.
- You joined George Medicines with the company focused on advancing its global commercialization strategy for GMRx2. What attracted you to the company and what has energized you most since stepping into your role?
What initially caught my attention was George Medicines’ efficient research & development journey. Then when I learned more about the company’s pragmatic approach to trying to solve such a huge global health problem, I was sold. I’d been following their updates for years and it seemed several things were converging: strong clinical evidence, regulatory momentum and a business model capable of translating that science into impact at scale. George Medicines had also secured its first commercialization partnership and that really excited me. It was now time to focus on execution, partnerships, commercialization, access and growth. So the timing was perfect.
George Medicines was also distinctive in other ways. There’s deep experience across the leadership team, ethical values from The George Institute for Global Health’s heritage and the practicality of a lean organization. Seeing how each team member reinforces the culture of effective decision making while maintaining a clear ambition to help as many patients as possible, deeply aligns with my personal values.
The environment itself really resonated with how my own career had developed too. During my career, I’ve worked with experts across commercial strategy, clinical research, regulatory affairs, manufacturing, supply chain & logistics, RWE (real world evidence), HEOR (health economics and outcomes research), market access, commercial launch and more. Having supported over 100+ biotech and medtech companies in the past, I’ve seen many different assets and business models up close. The biggest lesson from that experience is that value is often created or lost at the interfaces between functions. An early protocol design choice is not simply a clinical development decision. It impacts timelines and cost, of course, but it also eventually determines the evidence available to regulators and payers, the future label, reimbursement potential and the commercial value of the asset. Which can ultimately determine whether a new innovation ever makes it into the hands of doctors or healthcare providers who need it to support their patients. All of it matters.
That need for interconnected ‘systems thinking’ is a huge part of what I find so energizing. It’s a perfect fit and an opportunity for me to help translate differentiated science into successful partnerships, patient access and improved global health.
- George Medicines’ model is built around the clinical development of established medicines, combining them into single-pill, multi-mechanism therapies, with regional partnerships to enable commercialization. From a Business Development perspective, what makes this model interesting and how do you decide which partners and territories to prioritize?
George Medicines has created a model that can be both capital efficient and commercially scalable without compromising the quality of the evidence.
Our starting point is to evaluate already well-characterized medicines, then combine them into a new formulation designed to be at optimized doses, specifically where their theoretical mechanisms of action combine and complement one another. We then run rigorous clinical trials to validate if and how that combination can improve treatment. This allows capital to be invested efficiently in generating meaningful evidence and moving the strongest assets through development, rather than carrying all of the sunk cost and uncertainty associated with discovering a new molecule from first principles.
Our model is to then partner with regional and local organizations who are not only therapeutically aligned with the right resources in place, but also have a firm understanding of their country-specific health infrastructure; including regulatory requirements, market access needs and supply pathways. This model allows George Medicines to leverage the skills of local experts in every region across the globe, rather than trying to build out our own in-house structure, which could end up both costly and unfit-for-purpose for a specific patient group. For a licensee, this creates an attractive starting position: understandable pharmacology, a differentiated new product, an advanced evidence package and significant unmet patient need.
Market size tells you there’s an opportunity, but it’s the commercial due diligence that tells you whether you can capture it. We select the best partner per region by looking at the overall picture whilst simultaneously deciding the sequential order in which we approach regions because of reliance pathways. Our process is centered on the patient: disease burden, treatment dynamics, and where our product could potentially improve care. From there, regulatory pathways and evidence requirements, affordability, supply economics and cost-to-serve all inform our strategy.
We use many different strategic management tools and business strategy frameworks including VRIO, Porter’s 5 Forces, blue ocean strategy and more, as part of a detailed analysis of partnering opportunities. Financial modelling and sensitivity analysis that pressure tests the rNPV vs COGS vs pricing vs EBITDA play a major part too. But at the end of the day you need to go out and actually discuss the details with partners. Trust needs to be built and experienced before it’s formalized. A spreadsheet can value an opportunity, but it can’t tell you whether a partner will execute. Our objective is to create and capture value over the full life of the relationship. For George Medicines, our partners and, ultimately, for patients.
- What is your guiding philosophy when it comes to building partnerships and managing alliances, and how do you see that approach driving success for George Medicines?
The principle I keep coming back to is that transactions create contractual rights, whereas alliances create outcomes. Another way to look at it is that signing a deal creates potential value, successful execution captures it.
Signing a licensing agreement is just the start of the work. Value is realized in the years that follow, after regulatory submissions, further clinical development, market access, forecasting, supply planning, launch execution, commercialization and lifecycle management. That is why licensing is fundamentally a team sport.
A successful alliance needs clarity from the beginning. Both organizations must understand what success looks like, where decision rights sit, which workstreams are accountable for delivery and how issues will be escalated. Alliance charters help, but joint steering committees should exist to make decisions, create measurable improvements and resolve problems. Not just hold status update meetings. If a regulatory assumption changes, demand is tracking differently from forecast or a manufacturing constraint emerges, surfacing that early is almost always better than trying to solve it quietly on one side. Early transparency gives the alliance more options and allows the right expertise to be brought around the problem quickly. Trust matters enormously. I see trust as ‘truth observed over time’. But it can still be operationalized from day one.
The strongest partnerships recognize that neither party has all the answers. A regional licensee often brings decades of local knowledge while George Medicines can offer knowledge of the product and global strategy. Value comes from combining those capabilities rather than duplicating them.
There is also a responsibility to learn systematically. Lessons should be captured in governance models and playbooks so the next partnership benefits from what the previous one taught all of us.
I’d probably conclude by saying, a good contract defines the relationship. A strong alliance continually improves how that relationship performs.
- As you engage with potential partners around the world, how do you see GMRx2 making a meaningful impact on hypertension care, particularly in markets where access and adherence remain major challenges?
The scale of the problem is extraordinary. The World Health Organization estimates that uncontrolled high blood pressure claims more than 10 million lives every year. Around 1.4 billion adults are living with hypertension, but only around one in five has it under control. What’s striking is that there are already many effective medicines available. So the challenge is not a lack of treatment options, it is a lack of sustained blood pressure control.
Pharmacology alone cannot solve the problem. Treatment complexity, therapeutic inertia, adherence, affordability and access all influence the treatment of hypertension. All these factors play a part in the problem that GMRx2 was designed to address. It combines three established hypertension medicines with complementary mechanisms. It’s formulated at lower doses for early use, and is designed to deliver the blood pressure-lowering benefits of a triple combination therapy early in the treatment pathway, with the known safety profiles of existing antihypertensive medicines.
There is substantial clinical data behind the program, with multiple Phase 3 studies supporting its use in different patient settings. Globally recognized treatment guidelines now acknowledge the preferred use of single-pill combinations over multiple individual drugs and, last year, triple combination antihypertensives were added to the WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines. So there is growing global recognition of their potential to improve blood pressure control and help patients to stay on therapy.
For George Medicines, the opportunity is therefore bigger than incorporating three medicines into one pill. It is about helping address the wider challenge of blood pressure control, then working with the right partners to translate strong evidence into local approval, affordability, reliable supply and patient access.
The science creates the potential. Execution determines how much of that potential reaches patients.
- What are your immediate Business Development priorities and how do you see this part of the business contributing to George Medicines’ long-term global growth?
The next phase of our growth is about turning a successful series of partnerships into something repeatable. The objective is not simply geographic expansion, it is scalable commercial capability that brings a bigger impact for patients in every region.
With a regulatory approval in a major territory already secured, six licensing and supply partnerships signed across multiple regions to date, and more collaborations anticipated, the priority now is to balance execution with expansion.
We’re committed to helping the partnerships already in place to progress successfully towards registration, launch and access. A strong license agreement creates the opportunity. Coordinated execution is what brings that opportunity to life. Integrated business planning supports our daily discussions and decisions across all timelines: near-term, medium-term and long-term.
At the same time, there is still geographic white space. So evaluating the right markets and partners via continued search and evaluation remains absolutely essential. The goal is not to simply accumulate agreements. Each partnership should make the next one better. We aim to establish a partnership network that compounds capability as it grows.
That leads to the third priority: repeatability. Every diligence process, negotiation, regulatory submission and launch preparation generates knowledge. We proactively capture that knowledge in reusable frameworks, market archetypes, governance models and playbooks that can help others in the future. Over time that creates a scalable commercialization platform. A high-quality regional network that can provide the infrastructure needed to take differentiated cardiometabolic innovation from early stages to commercialization. Lifecycle opportunities, future products, and broader portfolio growth all become possible.
All of a sudden, Business Development becomes broader than transaction execution. Search and evaluation, capital allocation, portfolio prioritization, market entry, lifecycle management and the timing of value inflection points all contribute to what George Medicines does next.
The ambition is to build a commercial system that creates value, captures value and becomes stronger every time it’s used. Therefore, supporting sustainable growth and durable enterprise value. Because ultimately, the purpose of building this sustainable commercial platform is clear: to help more patients access the treatments they need, wherever they are and whenever they need them.