Emma Walmsley

Five years into her transformation-focused tenure, Walmsley says the global drugmaker is at last ready to deliver results. She completed the final step of that overhaul this summer, spinning off GSK’s $13 billion consumer health unit—Europe’s largest de-merger in decades. That leaves the now exclusively pharma-focused GSK with a pile of cash to invest in promising drug and vaccine candidates, like those it acquired through Sierra Oncology and Affinivax this year.