Top 10 Pharma Companies by R&D Spend 2024
In 2024, the pharmaceutical industry witnessed significant shifts in research and development (R&D) investments, with companies like Merck & Co. and AstraZeneca making notable strategic decisions that impacted their positions among top R&D spenders.
The average cost for major pharmaceutical companies to develop a drug in 2024 rose to $2.23 billion, up from $2.12 billion the previous year. This increase reflects the growing complexity and expense associated with bringing new therapies to market. (Fierce Biotech)
These developments illustrate the dynamic nature of R&D investments in the pharmaceutical sector, influenced by strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and the escalating costs of drug development.
1. Merck & Co.
R&D SPENDING 2024: $17.9 billionChange from 2023: -41%Total 2024 revenue: $64.2 billion
R&D budget as percentage of revenue: 28%
Merck & Co.’s R&D spending plummeted from the deal-inflated high of 2023—and yet still came in $700 million ahead of its nearest challenger.
The nearly $13 billion drop in R&D spend reflects a scaling back of Merck’s dealmaking activity after a bumper 2023. Having paid $10.2 billion to buy Prometheus Biosciences and $5.5 billion to partner with Daiichi Sankyo in 2023, the drugmaker placed a series of smaller bets last year. Only one deal—the $1.35 billion spent on the takeover of EyeBio—surpassed $1 billion, compared to three $1 billion-plus deals Merck inked the year before.
As Merck eased back on deals, its R&D team stepped up spending to advance new and existing assets. Costs incurred directly by Merck Research Laboratories, the company’s human health R&D division, rose $1.1 billion last year. Merck attributed the rise to higher compensation and benefit costs, partly because its head count grew, plus higher clinical development spending, including for recently acquired drugs.
The ratcheting up of R&D activity comes as Merck prepares for the loss of exclusivity on Keytruda, the megablockbuster that has driven growth at the company for years. Keytruda has consistently added billions of dollars to Merck’s revenue each year since it became a blockbuster in 2016, culminating in its sales topping $29 billion last year. Now, the end of the boom years is in sight.
Merck is mounting a multifront deal and R&D blitz to establish a portfolio of growth drivers capable of offsetting the anticipated waning of Keytruda sales. Speaking at a TD Cowen event in March 2025, Merck Chief Financial Officer Caroline Litchfield said the company has three times as many late-phase assets as it did 3.5 years ago and could deliver 20 launches in the coming years.
Believing many of the launches could do blockbuster business, Litchfield said the portfolio of new drugs offers the promise of more than $50 billion in revenues by the mid-2030s. That forecast is the basis for Merck’s assertion that it faces a patent hill, not a cliff. By racking up almost $50 billion in R&D expenses in two years, Merck is running up that hill to secure a glimpse at its post-Keytruda future.
There’s one ace in the hole, with analysts arguing over just how much Merck can make from their late-stage subcutaneous version of Keytruda, which will come with a whole new patent life to profit off of. But whether it’s $6 billion or $7 billion a year, that still leaves a Grand Canyon-sized gap in the budget that must be filled. And the rep of CEO Rob Davis and R&D chief Dean Li will be made or lost on their pipeline strategy for a Keytruda replacement.
Or replacements.
“The future is less monolithic Keytruda,” Davis said. “It’s going to be a lot of smaller, precision-based therapies aimed at specific tumors or indications.”
It’s going to take a lot of smaller drugs to mend a rip that size.
That means a long string of deals, including a move to elbow its way to the future of immunotherapy with a rival to Summit’s PD-1/VEGF combo. And that required a turn to China, following what is now a well-beaten path for new drugs that they’ve bet big on.
Merck kept the focus on China when it inked a deal just days ago for an oral Lp(a) inhibitor from Hengrui. Novartis recently delayed the timeline for wrapping its Phase 3 study for an antisense candidate for Lp(a) (partnered with Ionis), pushing the results for data on 8,000 patients to the first half of 2026. Merck put up a $200 million down payment on a $2 billion deal for an oral treatment that will need to go through a global program. That’s a low-cost deal in front of a major trial expense, and it offers a chance to leap into a race where orals may well end up ruling the franchise.
But it’s no Keytruda.
Investors don’t care much for the overall picture. Merck’s shares have dwindled more than 21% over the past year, even as sales kept climbing. Wall Street wasn’t crazy about Merck’s decision to withdraw guidance on Gardasil, at all. And the Keytruda dilemma has created a narrative that has dominated the company for years now.
Merck execs can project confidence, but R&D spending illustrates a high level of anxiety.2. Roche
R&D SPENDING 2024: $17.2 billion (15.3 billion CHF)
R&D SPENDING 2023:
$16 billion (14.2 CHF)
CHANGE: +8%
REVENUE: $70.3 billion (62.3 billion CHF)
R&D SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE: 24%
CMO/DEVELOPMENT: Levi Garraway; Aviv Regev at Genentech
TICKER: RHHBY
The big picture: You can bet that Roche execs were paying particularly close attention to AstraZeneca’s recent release of a positive, preliminary slice of late-stage data for camizestrant, its oral SERD for hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. The Basel-based pharma giant has been angling — alongside Eli Lilly — to beat a path to the market with a best-in-class oral SERD that can be expected to rack up billions a year, provided they get in early on a field that has been a primary concern for years.
Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker has pegged giredestrant as one of its top late-stage drugs, putting it in the pole position of a chart of potential blockbusters as it waits for late-stage data from their persevERA and evERA trials. It’s in a group of seven pipeline therapies that Roche believes can pave the way to new franchises worth $3 billion or more. AstraZeneca has pegged its rival as a $5 billion-plus earner, offering some added insight here on where the market is focused.
But the others include some high flyers that face daunting odds in the clinic, as well as a cluster of rivals that Roche has to race for best-in-class status.
Take, for example, the amyloid buster trontinemab, which recently offered an early picture of its ability to target the plaque — cognition was not part of that study, though. And the road for Alzheimer’s drugs is long and frequently twisted, with a questionable marketing future if it fails to do more than slow progression.
Prasinezumab has failed a couple of mid-stage studies for Parkinson’s, as investigators try to find a population where it works. Parkinson’s remains one of the toughest targets in the industry, with repeated setbacks for key players — including a rival with the mechanism as Roche’s drug.
Trontinemab and prasinezumab are both up for Phase 3 enabling readouts this year.
Astegolimab is a dark horse Phase 3 candidate in a group of drugs aimed at taking on Dupixent’s dominant role in COPD. That drug — which inhibits the IL-33 receptor ST2 — was flagged for pivotal readouts this year from the ALIENTO and ARNASA trials.
A couple of years ago, Roche fronted $310 million to partner with Alnylam on the RNAi drug zilebesiran for hypertension, which has posted positive mid-stage data. That makes the cut as a major potential player.
NXT007 offers a new shot at hemophilia A after Roche took a hit on its gene therapy out of the Spark buyout. Long term, Roche wants to keep building around the Hemlibra franchise, which brought in $5 billion in 2024.
In the follow-up category of potential blockbusters, Roche counts four drugs with $2 billion to $3 billion in peak sales potential. That group includes their BTK inhibitor fenebrutinib, which has reportedly done well in Phase 2 for MS. That’s up for a pivotal readout this year, along with vamikibart, which is in two studies called SANDCAT and MEERKAT for uveitic macular edema.
As one of the biggest R&D operators in the world, Roche can afford a big pipeline with a number of misses. It’s the one or two big successes in each group of contenders that sustain a company of this size, as it proved yet again with their Regeneron rival Vabysmo, which broke through the $4 billion barrier last year as Tecentriq flattened out and exhibited signs of erosion. Polivy also jumped into the blockbuster club, marking a key marketing success.
The key thing for Roche R&D is putting up a slate of credible contenders, with a group of late-stage candidates tackling big diseases and at least one big prospect that looks competitive in the multibillion-dollar class.
To that end, Roche continues to selectively snap up new candidates and forge new alliances around the globe. In recent months we’ve tracked an antibody pact with UK biotech Oxford BioTherapeutics, heavily weighted to biobucks as is common in discovery deals. And they went back to the China well for a new deal with Innovent on small cell lung cancer that cost $80 million in upfront cash. Paying $1 billion for the off-the-shelf CAR-T tech at Poseida amounted to a small bolt-on in this world. Roche paid $2.7 billion for Carmot, and had some positive early data to exhibit last year.
A lot of this will sour or fizzle out. TIGIT was once a hot prospect, but it’s all been bad news on that front.
You win some, you lose some in Big Pharma. Roche has been winning enough to stay on top, but the pressure is always on.
3. AstraZeneca
R&D budget 2024: $13.6 billionChange from 2023: 24%
Total 2024 revenue: $54 billion
R&D budget as percentage of revenue: 25%
After boosting R&D spend by 12% the previous year, AstraZeneca did it again in 2024, upping its budget by 24% to take the No. 4 spot on our list. Similarly to last year, AstraZeneca's R&D budget made up about a quarter of total revenue.
Kicking 2024 off, heart disease drug acoramidis hit in a phase 3 trial in Japan, where AstraZeneca holds rights to the asset. BridgeBio holds rights to the TTR stabilizer in the U.S., where the drug was approved in November. However, that high was swiftly followed by a low when AstraZeneca axed an antibody program for diabetic kidney disease after phase 2b data underwhelmed just a few days later.
This pattern continued later in the year, when the U.K. pharma's COVID-19 antibody sipavibart soared in phase 3, while a Daiichi Sankyo-partnered ADC demonstrated no overall survival benefit in advanced or metastatic nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer after the partners had already submitted it for FDA approval. The duo subsequently withdrew the filing, instead refiling in a subset of patients on the back of a subgroup analysis with more positive results.
AstraZeneca spent big to bolster both ends of its pipeline in 2024, most notably inking a $2 billion deal to fold radiopharma Fusion Pharmaceuticals and its phase 2 prostate cancer prospect into its cancer unit. The firm also continued its interest in rare diseases, acquiring Amolyt Pharma and a phase 3 asset for a rare thyroid disease for $800 million.
A cadre of smaller deals made up the bulk of AstraZeneca's preclinical deal activity, with the pharma putting down $80 million for a new obesity biotech, $19 million for preclinical cancer antibodies and $45 million to develop a preclinical EGFR degrader.
AstraZeneca has said its focus is on investing in "transformative new technologies and modalities" that will power growth to 2030 and beyond, with certain areas, such as T-cell engagers and obesity, becoming increasingly popular across the industry.
4. J&J
2024 PHARMA R&D SPENDING: $13.5 billion (Medtech adds $3.7 billion)
2023 PHARMA R&D SPENDING: $12 billion
CHANGE: +12.5%
REVENUE FROM PHARMA: $60 billion
R&D SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE: 22.5%
R&D CHIEF: John Reed
TICKER: $JNJ
The big picture: With biosimilar competition ramping up this year for Stelara, one of J&J’s mainstay mega-franchises ($10.4 billion in 2024), the pharma giant needs to rack up some regulatory wins from the late-stage pipeline.
The company’s R&D group breathed a sigh of relief when icotrokinra, its big program for IBD brought in from Protagonist, recently delivered — at least on the major points we could see in the company statement — in an important mid-stage trial of the oral IL-23 therapy.
J&J execs, who have been slowly unfolding a pipeline-in-a-product strategy for this drug, believe icotrokinra can be a $5 billion-a-year earner, putting it at the tip of the big phalanx of R&D projects now in the pipeline.
Another late-stage drug that gets a lot of attention at J&J is nipocalimab for generalized myasthenia gravis, which has nabbed breakthrough drug status at the FDA as it looks for an OK. And there’s a new fast-track designation for this drug in moderate-to-severe Sjögren’s disease.
J&J is a behemoth with a long list of marketed drugs, a fact that comforts risk-averse investors. But the churn tends to deter anyone looking for some quick upside. Its medtech group spent $3.7 billion on R&D last year, helping maintain a stable of products that deliver on the bottom line. That helps keep the numbers steady. And it helps when one-time blockbusters-to-be — I’m talking about aticaprant here — flounders in its Phase 3. J&J had slated the anti-depressant in the $1 billion to $5 billion category, up until a few weeks ago when the drug giant wrote it off for insufficient efficacy.
Anyone who’s been following depression R&D for the past 20 years wouldn’t have been too surprised to see yet another Phase 3 fail here. But neuro is still surging on increased confidence that scientists can deliver major drugs for unmet needs. For J&J, the belief helped inspire the Intra-Cellular Therapies buyout for $14.6 billion during JPM, finally breaking the year-plus drought of M&A deals that broke the $5 billion barrier.
That deal, like the top drugs in its pipeline, underscores a well-known fact about J&J. The company is a global player in R&D — helping break the mold on China deals when it picked up the cancer drug Carvykti. But while the company can be a world-class drug picker, it’s not known for discovery work.
J&J has also long been operating under a cloud brought on by its talc settlement talks, where the numbers people have set aside billions and appear to be close to finally completing a deal to shunt talc into a subsidiary and settle up with the bulk of the lawsuits. It’s manageable, but after 16 years and thousands of suits, J&J’s investors would like to move on. Following its spinout of the consumer division, J&J is on an R&D path — sticking with diseases its researchers understand well — it’s likely to follow for years. And that will keep BD busy.
5. AbbVie
R&D budget: $12.8 billionChange from 2023: 66.5%
Total 2024 revenue: $56 billion
R&D budget as percentage of revenue: 23%
AbbVie entered 2024 with a splashy acquisition, only for the star asset at the center of the move to flounder.
The $8.7 billion buy of Cerevel Therapeutics was finalized in August 2024, giving AbbVie control of schizophrenia prospect emraclidine. About 100 days later, the asset flunked a pair of phase 2 trials, earning a spot on Fierce's list of the top 10 clinical trial flops of the year.
But the news wasn't all bad for AbbVie, which soared from the bottom of last year's spending list to take the No. 5 spot with a whopping 66.5% R&D budget increase. Another Cerevel asset, Parkinson's disease prospect tavapadon, scored a phase 3 hat trick, allowing AbbVie to prep for an FDA filing in 2025.
As the Cerevel activity shows, neuroscience was a big focus for AbbVie in 2024. The Chicago-area pharma giant paid $1.4 billion to buy Aliada Therapeutics, gaining control of an Alzheimer’s disease candidate Aliada originally in-licensed from Johnson & Johnson. The firm also inked a deal with Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals to develop next-gen therapies for psychiatric disorders and paid $25 million upfront to form a neuro drug discovery pact with Gedeon Richter, the originator of AbbVie's star antipsychotic Vraylar (cariprazine). AbbVie inherited Vraylar and the Gedeon Richter partnership from the 2020 acquisition of Allergan.
The other big contributor to AbbVie's R&D boost this year was inflammation. The Big Pharma shelled out $250 million in cash to acquire Celsius Therapeutics and its lead inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) asset. That deal came a month after the June purchase of a preclinical IBD candidate from Chinese company FutureGen Biopharmaceutical. The FutureGen deal was AbbVie's late entry to the anti-TL1A party, which kicked off in 2023 when Roivant and Prometheus both shared promising midphase data from trials targeting the protein. Fellow revelers include Merck, Sanofi and Roche.
Toward the end of the year, AbbVie tripled down on IBD, acquiring Roche spinout Nimble Therapeutics for $200 million and securing a preclinical psoriasis and IBD candidate as a result.
6. Bristol Myers Squibb’s
R&D SPENDING 2024: $11.15 billion
R&D SPENDING 2023: $9.3 billion
CHANGE: +20%
REVENUE: $48.3 billion
R&D SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE: 23%
CMO/DEVELOPMENT: Samit Hirawat;
CRO/RESEARCH: Robert Plenge
TICKER: BMY
The big picture: Every time a CEO or biotech investor starts making the case for more M&A, often on background, they inevitably point to Bristol Myers as the poster child for Big Pharma pipeline demand. It faces huge looming patent losses — let’s start with Opdivo — and has a couple of years to wait for the kind of registrational data needed for its most promising late-stage drugs.
The pharma giant has certainly been a player in the M&A club, snapping up Karuna ($14 billion), RayzeBio ($4.1 billion for a radiopharmaceutical drug in a hotly contested arena) and Mirati ($5.8 billion for KRAS) along the way. But recent moves aimed at cutting costs while boosting work in Phase 3 underscore just how tricky this can be. And all the buzz about its need for pricey buyouts hummed right along through a muted year of dealmaking in 2024.
By all accounts, a few analysts on the Street seem satisfied that Cobenfy — out of Karuna — is on track to a blockbuster future, starting with schizophrenia and potentially expanding into Alzheimer’s. But its launch late last year didn’t come close to satisfying the skeptics rooting for more BD — which has been encouraged by a set of execs ready and willing to talk up their expectations on the acquisitions side of the business.
Among the drugs in late-stage work, you’ll find new multiple myeloma therapies, which Samit Hirawat talked up in the last quarterly run-down. “ … It is very important to continue to develop small molecules, which are easy to deliver and can be combined with the standard of care therapies. And that’s exactly where iberdomide, mezigdomide sit,” he added, highlighting head-to-heads with pomalidomide (Pomalyst) — facing near-term generic competition — and Revlimid — already losing ground to copycats.
Overall, costs have been headed up in R&D at Bristol Myers, and with all hands on deck for a Phase 3 revival of the portfolio, the pharma giant is poised to keep pouring money into drug development.
7. Eli Lilly
R&D budget: $10.99 billionChange from 2023: 18%
Total 2024 revenue: $45 billion
R&D budget as percentage of revenue: 24%
Eli Lilly has enjoyed a stellar year of sales, adding more than $10 billion year over year while also seeing its R&D budget grow from $9.31 billion in 2023 to just shy of $11 billion last year. That huge revenue bump has, however, seen its R&D budget as a percentage of sales fall from 27% to 24%, still a healthy ratio and enough to maintain the seventh place it scored in last year's report.
Lilly's sales success has predominately come from its tirzepatide diabetes and obesity franchise, which includes Zepbound and Mounjaro. The franchise has brought blockbuster sales for the Indianapolis Big Pharma and is guiding an even greater revenue jump in 2025. But Lilly is not resting on its laurels. The company is funneling more cash into its pipeline for the next big bets.
This has included looking outside its internal research units and spending some of that new cash on new deals. Most recently, this came in the form of a potential $1.25 billion deal with Magnet Biomedicine for its molecular glue platform to develop new versions of the sticky molecules.
It also, at the start of the year, penned a $2.5 billion buyout of Scorpion Therapeutics and its PI3Kα pipeline to boost its cancer work.
And Lilly is looking from within with big plans surrounding its numerous internal incretin therapies. Speaking to investors back in February, executives from the Big Pharma laid out a new strategy to test some of those incretin drugs across neurology and immunology indications, and far beyond the approved uses of incretins, which are typically in diabetes and obesity.
But it's not all been good news. Last fall, the Big Pharma dropped the lead candidate from its $2.4 billion takeover of Dice Therapeutics, removing the DC-806 psoriasis program from its phase 2 pipeline in a pivot to DC-853, another oral IL-17 candidate Dice designated as a fast follower of its lead asset.
8. Pfizer
R&D SPENDING 2024: $10.8 billion
R&D SPENDING 2023: $10.7 billion
CHANGE: —
REVENUE: $63.6 billion
R&D SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE: 17%
R&D CHIEF: Chris Boshoff
TICKER: PFE
The big picture: By the end of 2022, Pfizer’s rep was pure gold. There was a king’s ransom in revenue for the multinational operation as it capitalized big time on its rapidly successful alliance with BioNTech for their mega-franchise mRNA vaccine to combat Covid. And CEO Albert Bourla basked in the glow of accolades for helping save the world — with the exception of some stray trolls.
Then the world turned, vaccine demand plummeted far past most projections and Pfizer was left to pick up the pieces with a revised R&D game plan and revenue that only modestly improved in 2024 after bottoming out at $59.5 billion in ’23.
Now, instead of continuing accolades for a truly historic vaccine rollout, analysts were reminded of Pfizer’s long track record for hit-and-miss performance in R&D and commercial ops. And it remains a big player in vaccines, where the long reach of the new Trump administration and its vaccine critics has extended to scrubbing out references to mRNA.
Those persistent doubts led Pfizer to recruit Citi analyst — and longtime Pfizer doubter — Andrew Baum to help sell the company’s innovation plans. And he likely is more aware than most of just how hard that is as Pfizer looks to largely tread water on the numbers side this year.
Buying Seagen set its course for a higher profile in oncology, which was on display as Bourla cheered their late-stage programs in his recent assessment of what’s ahead. Bourla earlier tapped oncology chief Chris Boshoff to take over R&D from Mikael Dolsten, signaling that it’s relying on a slate of cancer drugs to help replace Ibrance and Xtandi as those big blockbusters lose exclusivity in a couple of years — mere ticks of the clock in drug development cycles.
So it’s no surprise to see company execs talking up prospects for the CDK4 inhibitor atirmociclib, now in a Phase 3 breast cancer study. But they took a nasty hit a few weeks ago when vepdegestrant, its protein degrader partnered with Arvinas, fell short in another breast cancer study.
Baum also has his work cut out for him talking up Pfizer’s big plans for their oral obesity drug danuglipron, with analysts shaking their heads over a twice-daily dosing as rivals make progress on that front with drugs that may be much better positioned. Its cachexia drug ponsegromab, meanwhile, has had its late-stage development plan trimmed.
Underscoring the doubts about Pfizer, analysts haven’t liked watching its sales of RSV vaccine Abrysvo plunge in a turbulent market for everyone involved. The pharma player has to perform consistently on sales if it expects to overcome the skeptics at this point.
Add it all up and Pfizer looks like it will continue to operate under a cloud for some time to come, needing to establish a solid track record of significant new approvals and reliable marketing success.
In the meantime, look for the company to keep shelling out big dividends to keep investors happy.
9. Novartis
R&D budget: $10 billionChange from 2023: -12.6%
Total 2024 revenue: $50.3 billion
R&D budget as percentage of revenue: 20%
In 2024, Novartis dropped down five spots from last year’s list, cutting R&D spend by more than $1 billion.
The Big Pharma has slimmed down its clinical-stage programs by nearly 40% in recent years, CEO Vas Narasimhan, M.D., told investors in November.
“Historical data shows that Novartis has been pretty consistent as a leader in the number of drugs that are approved, but rarely in the top quartile or top half in the value of those medicines,” Narasimhan said. “We took that data to heart and really wanted to rethink how we approach our pipeline.”
Though the company slimmed down its pipeline, it continued to ink deals, building off its radiopharma legacy with a $1 billion acquisition of Mariana Oncology. Novartis was specifically interested in Mariana’s focus on the radioactive metallic element actinium, whereas the Swiss pharma’s other approved radioligand therapies use lutetium. With Mariana, the pharma can expand into other radioisotopes.
The drugmaker also acquired MorphoSys for $2.9 billion in cash, picking up pelabresib, a phase 3 therapy being tested in combination with Incyte’s Jakafi in patients with myelofibrosis, plus tulmimetostat, an early-stage dual inhibitor of EZH2/EZH1 proteins.
However, Novartis ran into trouble after revealing a safety signal that could set back plans to seek approval for pelabresib by a few years. The Swiss pharma said a “longer follow-up time is needed to determine, in consultation with health authorities, the regulatory path for pelabresib in myelofibrosis.”
Toward the end of the year, Novartis also signed off on $1.1 billion in a combination of upfront cash and potential milestone payments to buy the gene therapy biotech Kate Therapeutics. The San Diego-based preclinical biotech is focused on Duchenne muscular dystrophy, facioscapulohumeral dystrophy and myotonic dystrophy type 1.
This year, Novartis expects to receive an approval for atrasentan in immunoglobulin A nephropathy and to submit remibrutinib for approval in chronic spontaneous urticaria.
10. GSK
R&D SPENDING 2024: $8.2 billion (£6.4 billion)
R&D SPENDING 2023: $8 billion (£6.2 billion)
CHANGE: +2.5%
REVENUE: $40.5 billion
R&D SPENDING AS A PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE: 20%
R&D CHIEF: Tony Wood
TICKER: GSK
The big picture: There are a lot of moving parts at GSK, and not all are headed in the right direction. Its RSV vaccine sales have been on a roller coaster ride. The UK pharma’s big bet on Shingrix was dinged by slipping sales last quarter, all while the Trump administration helped cast a pall over vaccines in general that may well endure for four years. The vaccine market in China has also been wobbly, as Merck can attest to with Gardasil.
On the other hand, GSK once again has high hopes for Blenrep, which was yanked from the market in 2022 after flunking a confirmatory study. The IL-5 therapy depemokimab has excited great expectations for £3 billion in annual sales, following up on the success of their asthma drug Nucala. All the while the BD group keeps turning up new deals that bolster their case without weighing heavily on the numbers side. And CEO Emma Walmsley, now an eight-year veteran in the top spot, is promising to move its top line to $50 billion, moving from £31.4 billion last year to 40 billion — a 27% increase in seven years.
A lot of that increase will depend on how GSK’s commercial arm can capitalize on new therapeutics like their newly approved antibiotic gepotidacin. Commercial chief Luke Miels has cited analysts’ estimates for up to $1.25 billion for that program, but not everyone is nearly that enthusiastic about the near-term chances for a new antibiotic that could take years to gain a firm footing in the market.
GSK has never been flashy. The stock is down about 10% over the past year. If you pull back over a three-year timeline, since GSK spun off its commercial group, the stock is down 19%, all of which has some analysts wondering if the large-cap company may once again become a target of the activist crowd.
References:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/top-10-pharma-rd-budgets-2024
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