The 15 top R&D spenders in the glob­al bio­phar­ma busi­ness: 2016

Just about every play­er on this list has trig­gered a ma­jor over­haul of R&D in the past decade

Over the past nine years that I’ve been an­a­lyz­ing Big Phar­ma’s R&D num­bers, there’s been some fluc­tu­a­tion in the top ten, but over­all spend­ing has re­mained fair­ly steady at rough­ly $70 bil­lion a year.

Some big trends, though, emerge af­ter you move be­yond the top line num­ber. Just about every play­er on this list has trig­gered a ma­jor over­haul of R&D in the past decade, shut­ter­ing fa­cil­i­ties, lay­ing off staffers, or at the very least chop­ping out core re­search ar­eas and ei­ther nar­row­ing their fo­cus or adding new ones. (And it’s not over yet, as you can see from yes­ter­day’s Mer­ck re­or­ga­ni­za­tion sto­ry.) The tur­bu­lence has helped per­suade a long list of top ex­ecs to leave the biggest com­pa­nies and leap to the helm of biotech star­tups, which have been en­riched by an IPO boom (now strug­gling) and a VC romp of his­toric pro­por­tions (not over yet). Can­cer re­mains the Big Kahu­na as new drugs of­fer dra­mat­ic break­throughs, and some high dra­ma, which is one rea­son why there is still lin­ger­ing un­cer­tain­ty over GSK’s de­ci­sion to swap its late-stage and com­mer­cial as­sets for No­var­tis’s vac­cines op­er­a­tion. Im­muno-on­col­o­gy in par­tic­u­lar­ly is dri­ving bil­lions of dol­lars in new in­vest­ments, and not just by Bris­tol-My­ers and Mer­ck.

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