After a rocky few years, Bayer is in the midst of a turnaround period and cruising ahead with the best pipeline the 100-plus-year-old company has ever seen, according to Christine Roth, head of global product strategy and commercialization at the German conglomerate.
“We’re focused on highlighting an extraordinary year in 2025, our growth priorities and how we’re renewing our top line,” Roth said.
Like many in Big Pharma, Bayer has been grappling with a major patent loss.
When its blockbuster blood thinner Xarelto toppled from the cliff last year, Bayer forecasted a $1 billion sales loss with atrophied growth of about -2%, Roth said.
The company also axed 12,000 jobs globally in the last few years while implementing extensive organizational changes.
And of course, Bayer has had to navigate the costly fallout of its $63 billion takeover of the lawsuit-riddled agricultural biochem company Monsanto in 2018. The acquisition was widely considered a “cautionary tale” in ill-advised dealmaking.
But Bayer aims to put those challenges in the rearview while it rebounds with promising drug launches and potential superstars on the way.
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this year, Bayer leadership said 2026 will be the “last flattish year” for its pharma division while it revs up sales for five key drugs. When Bayer reports full 2025 earnings later this month, company executives will sing a similar tune, Roth said, with the takeaway message that a rebound is just around the corner.
Bayer’s up-and-comers
Bayer’s crown jewel in this next era could be the oncology drug Nubeqa. The androgen receptor inhibitor notched its first FDA nod in 2019 for a type of prostate cancer and scored its most recent indication last year.
Already a blockbuster poised to take a leading position in prostate cancer, Nubeqa is being rolled out in 90 new countries and is expected to be one of Bayer’s “top performing drugs of all time,” Roth said.
Pharma sales will also hinge on whether Bayer can succeed in the tricky women’s health space.
The company secured an FDA approval for its first-in-class hot flash treatment Lynkuet last year. The dual-action therapy targets the NK1 and NK3 receptors and is going head-to-head against Astellas’ NK3-targeting treatment Veozah.
While both drugs can claim the milestone of offering new non-hormonal options to menopausal women, uptake isn’t assured.
Astellas pushed hard for Veozah, spending over $24 million on commercials in 2023 and landing a Super Bowl ad the following year. Although sales jumped by 44% in the first three months of 2025 compared to the year before, Astellas recently reported that Veozah’s market growth is progressing slower than expected and that it’s reviewing its previous peak sales estimates of over $2 billion.
But Astellas’ troubles haven’t rattled Bayer’s confidence.
“We have a long history in women’s health and a differentiated asset,” Roth said. “We’ve had good conversations with payers and want to make sure that if a woman and her doctor decide it’s the right step, they don’t have to wait weeks to find out if it’s going to be covered.”
Bayer is also striving to continue boosting market traction for its kidney and heart disease drug Kerendia, which won a new indication last year.
Called a “blockbuster in the making” by Bayer’s pharma chief, Stefan Oelrich, Kerendia sales were on the upswing throughout 2025.
In the pipes
Bayer has a core strategy at play. The company’s roots run deep in areas like oncology, cardiology, neuro degenerative disease and women’s health. But most of all, it’s looking for opportunities to break new ground.
“When we overhauled our pipeline, we took a newer approach to R&D with the mindset that we don’t want to [be part of the] herd after the same targets as other companies,” Roth explained. “We’re aiming to be first-in-class or best-in-class.”
Bayer’s R&D pipeline reflects that vision with collaborations underway leveraging a range of modalities in different diseases.
Through its 2020 acquisition of AskBio, for example, Bayer picked up a gene therapy platform with mid-stage candidates in Parkinson’s disease and other neuromuscular spaces. AskBio is also locked in a clinical race with the biotech Medera to develop a congestive heart failure treatment, and what could become one of the first gene therapies for the masses.
Bayer’s purchase of Vividion Therapeutics and its discovery platform for “undruggable targets” in oncology and immune diseases, as well as its deal to buy cell therapy specialist BlueRock Therapeutics, have built a pipeline of candidates taking shots at multiple goals.
“Our platform companies are designed to be innovation engines,” Roth said.
Behind the scenes
There’s much more to Bayer’s turnaround story than new drugs.
For the last few years, the company has launched an organizational overhaul that’s upended day-to-day operations.
As part of its sweeping layoffs, Bayer nixed about 50% of its leadership positions, Roth said, and implemented a system designed to transfer autonomy and decision-making to teams.
Those teams start by identifying if they’re working to support a product or a customer, or if they’re enabling those functions. From there, they’re given the freedom to set ambitious goals and then execute in an environment that’s more “nimble and agile,” Roth said.
Teams are also given a resource framework that fits their goals, rather than working within fixed budgets locked in departmental siloes.
“The flow of people, finances and resources is dynamic,” Roth said.
Nubeqa’s recent market growth, which was backed by a team that sets targets beyond analyst expectations, is an example of how well the system is working, according to Roth. And projects are organized into 90-day cycles so employees are not “locked into” the same work for years, Roth said.
Ultimately, it’s now up to teams to decide what they can and should accomplish.
“Gone are the days when teams had to wait for five levels of approvals,” Roth said. “Now, they’re empowered.”
