BI-3034701

Boehringer Ingelheim said it plans to keep up high levels of R&D spending, and could look at China-based companies for dealmaking, as key planks of its strategic approach this year, board chairman Shashank Deshpande said Wednesday. Deshpande was discussing the company’s 2025 performance on a call with members of the media. Last year, the German biopharma’s human drug sales grew 7.4% on a constant currency basis to €22.7 billion ($26.3 billion), and the company expects a similar trend this year. “We expect to grow this year on a comparable basis, adjusted for currency and extraordinary effects,” said Deshpande, who also heads Boehringer’s human pharma business unit. The company’s biggest money-makers in 2025 were once again its diabetes and heart drug Jardiance and the lung disease med Ofev. But sales in the US shrank 2% from 2024, hit by “quite substantial reductions in price” in the country. The Medicare prices of Jardiance, Ofev and the diabetes therapy Trajenta are all now negotiated under the IRA. If the impact on pricing in the US were to be excluded, finance chief Frank Hübler said, “we would have also grown there as we did in Europe and other regions.” The advent of new products could help. Boehringer has won two approvals so far this year, with the lung cancer treatment Hernexeos and the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug Jascayd . It also has an obesity drug that’s drawing attention. Survodutide, which Boehringer licensed from Zealand Pharma, is in two pivotal trials, and data are due at the American Diabetes Association meeting in June. “I would expect to see good weight loss in the context of important effects on the general metabolic [health] and particularly the liver,” Boehringer’s head of innovation Paola Casarosa told Endpoints News in an interview. Pressed on what good weight loss might look like, she declined to name a target percentage, but suggested that Boehringer is focused on quality over quantity: It wants to see if patients retain more muscle than on other incretin drugs, Casarosa said. Side effect rates have also been a key differentiator for the class. The drug is unlikely to reach market before the second half of 2027 — and even that might be ambitious. How will Boehringer compete with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and possibly also new entrants such as Pfizer and Roche? “It would be sort of arrogant to expect, well, we’re going to have a molecule that’s completely different from anything else,” Casarosa said. But survodutide has the unusual mechanism of GLP-1 and glucagon agonism — making it a potentially unique approach in a world of drugs that either only target GLP-1, or go after a different set of targets. Casarosa said she hopes that its glucagon agonism could allow survodutide to be particularly useful for obesity patients who also have liver disease. Phase 3 trials in the fatty liver condition known as MASH are also due this year. Boehringer also revealed on Wednesday that another obesity asset, its triple agonist, will head into Phase 2 this year. The program is somewhat mysterious: Casarosa declined to confirm its exact mechanism, so it might not be what’s known as a triple-G — an agonist of GLP-1, GIP and glucagon — like Lilly’s retatrutide or Novo Nordisk’s UBT251 . “We are investing with full speed and energy to the next steps, because we see the potential to really have strong weight loss in the context of, in our hands, unprecedented tolerance,” Casarosa said of the drug, which is called BI 3034701. Boehringer is developing it in collaboration with the Danish biotech Gubra. Survodutide and the triple agonist entered Boehringer’s pipeline via partnering deals, and they won’t be the last assets to follow this path. The company is looking at collaboration opportunities in China, and intends to stay in its familiar therapeutic areas of cardiovascular-renal-metabolism, oncology, inflammation and respiratory, and mental and eye health. “We would be looking at innovation and how we can leverage the upcoming innovation in China, how we can leverage Chinese speed in development — but all through the lens of our existing research portfolio,” Deshpande said on the media call. Alongside external sources of new products, the company is committed to spending on in-house R&D. It now plows over 27% of its net pharmaceutical sales into R&D for human therapeutics. About 40 to 50% of Boehringer’s portfolio has some elements of external innovation, Casarosa said, whether acquisitions, licensing or use of external technologies to make the molecules. She also pointed out that through its corporate venture fund, Boehringer can help seed new technologies.