Roche aims to become a “top three player” in obesity, Teresa Graham, CEO of the group’s Pharma unit, said Thursday during a presentation of the company’s full-year 2025 earnings.
With Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk jostling for the top two spots in the obesity space, Roche has its eyes on number three—at least for now, as the company advances a pipeline it says is better suited to the personal nature of weight-loss.
“Every patient is on an individual weight-loss journey,” Teresa Graham, CEO of Roche’s Pharma division, told reporters during a media conference Thursday where the company presented its full-year 2025 results. “The portfolio that we have built allows us to very easily address virtually every need that a patient may have.”
Roche has, indeed, been heavily investing in its obesity pipeline. In late 2023, for instance, the pharma dropped $2.7 billion to buy Carmot Therapeutics and its pipeline of GLP-1 and GIP receptor agonists. On Tuesday, Roche reported that one of Carmot’s assets, CT-388, hit a placebo-adjusted weight-loss of 22.5% at 48 weeks without showing signs of plateauing.
Outside of Carmot, Roche in March last year also linked up with Zealand Pharmaceuticals in an up to $5.3 billion alliance, gaining the right to co-develop and co-commercialize the amylin molecule petrelintide, which belongs to a class of drugs that could offer an alternative to GLP-1s.
Graham on the call also pointed to Roche’s $3.5 billion takeover of 89bio in September last year, which gave the pharma the FGF21 analog pegozafermin, being trialed for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). “MASH is the number one comorbidity that we see in patients with obesity,” she told reporters.
“All in all, we believe that we have the suite of medicines that allow us to address the full patient population,” she added.
Graham also hinted that Roche could set itself apart from the current industry leaders in the way that it delivers its obesity drugs to patients—though she declined to provide more detail. “We do intend to enter the market in a way that is much more patient-centric than what we’ve seen to date,” she said, but added, “I won’t say more about that today.”
Across its business last year, Roche reported a 7% increase in sales at constant currencies, with its pharma division accounting for the bulk of its revenue. Of Roche’s CHF 61.52 billion ($80.35 billion) sales in 2025, CHF 47.67 billion ($62.27 billion) came from its pharma unit, while the remainder came from its diagnostics group.
Ocrevus, indicated for multiple sclerosis, emerged as Roche’s top-selling product last year, hitting CHF 7.01 billion ($9.16 billion) in sales, followed by the hemophilia A therapy Hemlibra with CHF 4.75 billion ($6.20 billion) and the eye injection Vabysmo with CHF 4.102 billion ($5.36 billion). Phesgo, indicated for breast cancer, surged 48% year-on-year to bring in CHF 2.44 billion ($3.19 billion).
Roche has forecasted a mid-single-digit growth across its entire operations in 2026.
