On Monday, Novo Nordisk announced that the results from its Phase 3 trial investigating semaglutide as a treatment for Alzheimer’s “did not confirm the superiority of semaglutide versus placebo in the reduction of progression,” of the disease, according to the press release. Monday’s announcement had a silver lining. That is, the treatment did result in…
Lilly is set to lead pharma in 2026, but can it justify an $800B valuation?
Eli Lilly is on track to overtake pharma rivals and claim the industry’s top spot by late 2026, completing one of the most dramatic repositionings in Big Pharma’s recent history. Aggressive and base scenarios place Lilly’s rise to the number one slot in 2026, while a conservative prediction forecasts that the firm will do so…
2025 pharma M&A surges to $70 billion in major deals
Novo Nordisk’s $5.2 billion acquisition of Akero Therapeutics sits at the center of 2025’s hottest M&A space: MASH/metabolic disease. The deal, announced October 9, represents the largest of three major Fibroblast Growth Factor 21 (FGF21) analog acquisitions in five months. Across the broader landscape, 2025 pharma M&A activity reached approximately $70 billion in upfront consideration…
Top 25 drugs by sales: 2025 H1
The pharmaceutical blockbuster model is wobbling. And no single franchise is safe. While king Keytruda, Merck’s stalwart oncology drug, continues to rule the first half of 2025 with $15.2B in sales (Q1 $7.2B, Q2 $8.0B), its U.S. patent expiry in 2028 the single biggest loss of exclusivity event on the horizon. In the U.S., Medicare…
Evaluate accentuates shift to ‘big drugs for big diseases’ in 2030 projections
By now, almost everyone has heard about the meteoric rise of GLP-1 drugs, like Wegovy and Mounjaro. But a perhaps under-appreciated reality is that the GLP-1 obesity drugs are poised to drive record overall prescription drug sales growth and catapult Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly into the upper echelon of Big Pharma companies by the…
An overview of the GLP-1 landscape in obesity therapeutics
The GLP-1 drug market continues to boom lately thanks to highly effective new medications like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and continued demand for the drug class in diabetes. The runaway success of Wegovy and Ozempic (both formulations of semaglutide) has caused Novo Nordisk’s share price to skyrocket in 2023, briefly making the Danish pharmaceutical company the most…