The overall R&D productivity of the 30 largest public biopharma companies has increased despite a challenging global environment for investment and growth. Will hype cycles impact this picture in coming years?

The R&D productivity of the top 30 largest biopharma companies decreased slightly from 2021 to 2022 and the sector saw the lowest number of FDA approvals in the past 10 years. 

Companies such as Novartis, Roche or Takeda are heavily invested in the advanced therapeutics field, usually spreading their bets across multiple modalities. The remaining challenges offer opportunities for the next wave of innovation to transform the field once again and make a dent in the larger market of common diseases and solid tumors.

A turbulent 2021: we are now in our eighth year of reviewing R&D productivity and corporate growth of the top 30 biopharma companies. While 2021 was dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, biopharma as a whole had a good but not great year.

The decrease in overall R&D productivity continues – a trend that started in 2018. It would be too easy to attribute this fall in R&D productivity to COVID-19 alone.

Blockbuster status has long been the ultimate goal of drug development, defined as a sales potential of more than $1bn. The economics of drug development, and in fact of the entire biopharma industry, very much rely on these few gems that provide the returns to compensate for the long development pathway and often several billion dollars of investment per new molecular entity.