Primarily known as an immunology and neuroscience company, AbbVie wanted to put the biopharma world on notice during its J.P. Morgan presentation: its oncology portfolio is underappreciated. This week, the Illinois-based company dove into the sizzling PD-1/VEGF space with a licensing deal with China-based RemeGen.
It’s a poorly kept secret in biopharma that AbbVie intends to become the leading neuroscience company in the near future. It was a point the Illinois-based behemoth reiterated during its J.P. Morgan presentation on Wednesday.
“We anticipate being the largest neuroscience player in the industry soon,” Scott Reents, the company’s chief financial officer, said during the presentation.
But this wasn’t the only point the company wanted to highlight. “And then the oncology pipeline is something we’re also very excited about that probably isn’t as appreciated as we’d like it to be,” Reents said.
AbbVie took significant strides earlier this week to drive this point home, kicking off JPM26 with a licensing deal potentially worth nearly $5 billion for ex-China rights to RemeGen’s PD-1/VEGF bispecific. The pact—which will see AbbVie front $650 million—puts the company squarely in the middle of the hottest new trend in immuno-oncology, on which peers Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Merck have collectively bet more than $20 billion biobucks.
“We feel that can be a very nice complement to our c-MET franchise,” Reents said. AbbVie’s Emrelis, a c-Met-directed antibody and microtubule inhibitor conjugate, was approved by the FDA last May for patients with locally advanced or metastatic non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with high c-Met protein overexpression.
When asked about AbbVie’s overall approach to oncology R&D, Roopal Thakkar, executive vice president of research & development and chief scientific officer, said the company has “a very strong pipeline internally in a very active research group. . . . So we get assets out of that, a fairly consistent stream.”
Indeed, AbbVie currently has 18 investigational drugs in various stages of clinical development listed in its pipeline.
However, pointing to the RemeGen deal, Thakkar said, “I think you could anticipate from us looking externally for ways to complement the ADC franchise and on the [hematology] side as well.”
The RemeGen pact is far from the only oncology deal AbbVie has inked in recent months. Earlier this month, the company committed more than $1 billion in milestones for the ex-China rights to a Phase III DLL3xDLL3 T cell engager from Suzhou Zelgen Biopharmaceuticals that could challenge Amgen’s Imdelltra. And heading into JPM, AbbVie was one of two companies rumored to be interested in buying Revolution Medicines and its pipeline of targeted drugs for RAS-driven cancers. AbbVie has since denied the rumor.
While AbbVie is a well-diversified company with a significant presence in oncology and neuroscience, as well as eye care and aesthetics, it is possibly best known for its success in the immunology space, and the company’s executives spent half the presentation discussing its megablockbusters.
Now three years past the Humira loss of exclusivity cliff, AbbVie provided 2027 guidance of $31 billion inclusively for successor products Skyrizi ($20 billion) and Rinvoq ($11 billion). AbbVie plans to provide 2026 guidance for the two drugs when it presents its full-year 2025 earnings on Feb. 4.
Reents expressed confidence in the immunology duo’s revenue potential throughout the next several years.
“The runway is really significant still through the end of the decade and even into the 2030s as we go forward,” he said. “And that’s based on a certain way these immunology markets are structured and the breadth and depth that we have with both of those assets.”
