Steve Ubl, the leader of the drug in­dus­try's pow­er­ful Wash­ing­ton, DC lob­by­ing group PhRMA, will step down af­ter more than a decade as CEO.

End­points News broke the news of his an­tic­i­pat­ed ex­it ear­li­er Wednes­day, and PhRMA con­firmed Ubl’s plans in a state­ment lat­er in the day.

In an in­ter­view with End­points, Ubl said he had orig­i­nal­ly dis­cussed his de­par­ture with a small cir­cle of PhRMA’s board about a year and a half ago, but agreed to stay through at least the first part of the new ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The an­nounce­ment comes ahead of a piv­otal US elec­tion this year that will de­cide con­trol of Con­gress, and the tim­ing will give PhRMA sev­er­al months to search for a new CEO. Last year, the group spent about $38 mil­lion on lob­by­ing ef­forts, ac­cord­ing to lob­by­ing dis­clo­sures.

Gilead Sci­ences has ded­i­cat­ed around $11 bil­lion so far this year to three ac­qui­si­tions meant to bol­ster its pipelines in can­cer and im­munol­o­gy. The phar­ma com­pa­ny, once crit­i­cized for mak­ing bad deals, hopes it can suc­ceed this time in sub­stan­tial­ly di­ver­si­fy­ing from HIV.

Wall Street an­a­lysts ap­pear to be­lieve in the pur­chas­es. “We are ex­cit­ed by Gilead’s re­cent string of deals,” TD Cowen an­a­lyst Tyler Van Bu­ren wrote Wednes­day morn­ing.

Now, the com­pa­ny has to show that its bets will pay off.

The back-to-back ac­qui­si­tions do “not re­flect any change in the con­fi­dence we have in our ex­ist­ing clin­i­cal pipeline, nor any change in our phi­los­o­phy re­gard­ing M&A,” Gilead CEO Dan O’Day said on a call Tues­day evening. “Rather, it sim­ply re­flects the fact that three com­pa­nies met our high bar in quick suc­ces­sion.”

In­smed has giv­en up on Brin­supri in the painful skin dis­or­der hidradeni­tis sup­pu­ra­ti­va (HS) af­ter a mid-stage tri­al fail­ure. The com­pa­ny had ditched the pill in si­nus in­flam­ma­tion at the end of last year.

The study in HS, called CEDAR, was a com­pre­hen­sive bust. In­smed re­vealed late on Tues­day that both dos­es of Brin­supri were out­per­formed by place­bo on the pri­ma­ry end­point.

Af­ter four months’ treat­ment, pa­tients with mod­er­ate-to-se­vere dis­ease giv­en 10 mg and 40 mg pills once dai­ly had their to­tal ab­scess and in­flam­ma­to­ry nod­ule count re­duced by 45.5% and 40.3%, re­spec­tive­ly. The re­duc­tion in the place­bo group was 57.1%.