Eli Lilly Tops New Pharma Rankings of Industry R&D Performance
Measuring R&D performance in the pharmaceutical industry has long been a contested exercise. Years can pass between when a new drug is patented and when it reaches the market; the marketing around it can blur the question of what was actually discovered. A new pair of analyses reported by STAT News ranks the world's largest pharmaceutical companies on two different axes: invention (laboratories that find new active compounds) and innovation (laboratories that find new uses for existing ones).
Eli Lilly topped both rankings. The U.S.-based company has received approvals for 14 new active compounds in the past five years and brought eight existing molecules into new indications. The company's GLP-1 receptor agonist tirzepatide is the most visible of these; it continues to produce significant clinical effects in obesity and diabetes.
Bristol Myers Squibb came second on the invention ranking. The company brought seven new active compounds to market in the past three years, helped by investments in immuno-oncology. Boehringer Ingelheim, ranked third, was singled out for its concentration on chronic respiratory disease and rare genetic disorders.
The innovation ranking measures activities such as repositioning existing molecules, developing new dosing forms, building biosimilars, or generating evidence for distinct patient populations. Here Roche came second and Novo Nordisk third. Novo's ability to produce evidence for its semaglutide molecule across three separate uses — diabetes, obesity and, more recently, chronic kidney disease — was characterised as an unusually well-executed campaign.
The team building the ranking was led by senior pharmaceutical analyst Bernard Munos, an academic figure often cited for his statistical analyses of FDA approvals over the past two decades. The new ranking's methodology combines FDA, EMA and PMDA approvals from the past 60 months, attrition rates from cell to approval, and R&D spending per clinical phase.
In the methodology presentation, Munos said the traditional formula of "R&D spending divided by new drug count" had become out of date. "For twenty years, companies have been compared with that single simple ratio," he said. "But looking at reality, a lab can bring three new active compounds to market in a single year — exceptional — or it might bring just one that is the biggest achievement of the past four. The benchmark itself is wrong."
Some familiar names sit in the middle or lower stretches of the lists. AstraZeneca placed ninth for new active compound R&D over the past five years. Pfizer, following post-COVID-19 investment shifts, fell to 11th on the innovation list. Sanofi placed 14th on new active compound R&D.
The analysis arrives alongside ongoing drug-pricing debates in both U.S. and European markets. The Trump administration's plans to expand its TrumpRx programme, Maryland's price cap on Ozempic, and the United Kingdom's adoption of a Massachusetts model for tobacco regulation make this ranking a dataset that policymakers are likely to follow closely.
"There is no simple direct correlation between R&D and pricing," Munos wrote in the foreword to the analysis. "But when a company has produced no new active compound in five years and has not added new clinical uses to its existing molecules, a price increase cannot be justified on an R&D basis. This list shows for which companies that argument holds and for which it does not."
The authors plan to publish a separate list for smaller companies — those with under two billion dollars in annual revenue — within twelve months, working on the same dataset. About one-third of large-scale pharmaceutical R&D activity is now believed to pass from smaller biotech firms to larger ones through licensing arrangements.