Novartis will still be on the lookout for early-stage deals under $2 billion, and later-stage agreements around a product that could reach the market within five years, CEO Vas Narasimhan said Wednesday.
After back-to-back-to-back big-ticket acquisitions in 2025, Novartis appears to have no plans to slow down. CEO Vas Narasimhan told reporters Wednesday that the pharma’s dealmaking strategy will remain largely the same in 2026, with the goal of beefing up both its early- and late-stage pipelines.
“There’s really no change in our M&A strategy,” Narasimhan said Wednesday morning during a media call to present the pharma’s 2025 earnings results. “We’ve been really consistent in wanting to build out our early-stage pipeline” with deals in the “sub-$2-billion range.”
At the same time, Novartis is also on the lookout to “bring in medicines that could launch in the next five years,” Narasimhan added. To this end, he pointed out, the pharma has taken several major steps: Last October, the company acquired Avidity Biosciences for approximately $12 billion in an agreement that would turn out to be one of 2025’s largest.
The previous month, the pharma made a $1.4 billion bet to swallow Tourmaline Bio, which followed a $3.1 billion play in February 2025 to absorb the privately held Anthos Therapeutics. All three of these acquisitions gave Novartis a clutch of mid- to late-stage assets to advance to the market.
In between these buyouts, Novartis also inked a flurry of agreements for earlier-stage assets. These include a $5.7 billion deal with Monte Rosa to develop molecular glue degraders, a $1.7 billion AI-heavy contract with Relation to design drugs for atopic dermatitis and a $1.5 billion partnership with China’s SciNeuro for an anti-amyloid antibody for Alzheimer’s disease.
“We really don’t look at the size of the deal,” Narasimhan told reporters. Instead, the company is focused on how a particular asset or company fits into its overall pipeline strategy.
Novartis’ net sales in 2025 grew 8% year-on-year at constant currencies, exceeding $54.5 billion. The pharma’s best-selling product was the heart failure drug Entresto, which brought in nearly $7.75 billion in 2025—though this represented a 2% decrease from the same period the year prior.
Growth was mainly driven by the breast cancer therapy Kisqali, which jumped 57% year-on-year to earn $4.78 billion, and the prostate cancer radioconjugate Pluvicto, which made $1.99 billion, a 42% increase. Scemblix, approved for the treatment of certain types of chronic myeloid leukemia, surged 85% to hit 2025 sales of $1.29 billion.
Novartis forecasts continued stability and growth for 2026, with net sales anticipated to increase by a low-single-digit percentage.
