Positioning itself as a pure-play innovative medicines company, Novartis is bullish about the growth towards 2030 by placing an emphasis on a streamlined portfolio to drive sales, says CEO Vas Narasimhan.

Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan outlined projections for the company's future at the 2025 JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco on 14 January. Novartis, he said, expects peak sales of over $3bn for its eight leading branded products which, along with promising growth in China and Japan, which will fuel the company’s revenues throughout the next decade.

Chief among these drugs are Cosentyx (secukinumab) and Kisqali (ribociclib succinate), each projected by Novartis to generate peak sales of over $8bn. Alongside these, the company identified four drugs in clinical development, which it expects to drive growth in the 2030s; remibrutinib, OAV101 IT, and ianalumab, all in Phase III trials, and pelacarsen, currently in a Phase II trial (NCT04023552) for aortic valve stenosis.

Narasimhan said Novartis expects 15 submission-enabling data readouts in the next two years from their core assets, which will maintain profits in the face of patent expiries for their current blockbuster drugs.

Patent expiries of major drugs have been a key issue for big pharma, and is expected to be a major macroeconomic trend affecting the sector this year, as per GlobalData’s State of the BioPharmaceutical Industry 2025 report . GlobalData is the parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology . This in turn has increased the scrutiny on companies’ research and development strategies.

Novartis has refocussed its clinical pipeline, moving from 155 active projects in Q3 2021 to 94 in Q3 2024. This, Narasimhan says, has allowed Novartis during this period to invest 49% more full-time equivalent (FTE) per project—the ratio of working hours spent on R&D. The company will continue focusing on four core therapeutic areas-cardiovascular-renal-metabolic, immunology, neuroscience and oncology.

The company now expects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 6% between 2023 and 2028 with roughly similar growth projected for 2029 and beyond. Much of this growth is likely to be found in East Asian markets such as China, where Novartis achieved over 25% growth in sales during 2024, as well as Japan where Narasimhan stated regulatory reforms will aid the company.

With an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) integration in its R&D and implementation of its fast-to-IND strategy for preclinical assets, Novartis has over 30 potentially high-value new molecular entity (NME) candidates in clinical Phases I-III, which Narasimhan said are set to drive long term revenue growth.