Lilly’s Mounjaro launch hurtles towards the record books

Great things are forecast for Lilly’s type 2 diabetes and soon-to-be-obesity drug Mounjaro, with consensus for 2028 sales already hitting $17bn, according to Evaluate Pharma. First-quarter revenues smashed expectations yesterday, coming in at $569m, impressive considering that the product was only launched last May. Mounjaro is shaping up as one of biopharma’s most successful drug launches. Evaluate Vantage’s method of calculating this uses the first full four quarters of US sales, which yields the ranking below. Pandemic products are excluded – these would otherwise dominate the top 10 with six entries. These data were last run in 2018; since then Vertex’s Trikafta and Biktarvy, Gilead’s HIV triplet, have appeared. It could be argued that several of these drugs, as follow-ons or new combinations, have an unfair advantage over one-offs like Biogen’s Tecfidera; a previous analysis that excluded the antivirals brought products including Pharmacia’s Celebrex and Pfizer’s Ibrance into the top 10. Mounjaro, meanwhile, has amassed just over $1bn in its first full three quarters on the market, meaning that second-quarter sales need to hit $600m for the product to earn a place in the chart below. Watch this space.