GLP-1 Drugs Drive Pharma R&D Returns to 7% as Obesity Overtakes Oncology in Pipeline Value
Key Insights
Pharmaceutical R&D returns increased to 7% in 2025 from 5.9% in 2024, marking the third consecutive year of improvement driven primarily by GLP-1 (search) assets targeting obesity (search) and diabetes (search).
Obesity (search) drugs now account for 25% of total forecast late-stage pipeline sales, displacing oncology (search) as the largest contributor to pipeline value for the first time in 16 years.
GLP-1 (search) assets represent approximately 38% of projected commercial inflows, but excluding these drugs reveals underlying R&D productivity remains weak at just 2.9%.
The pharmaceutical industry's projected internal rate of return (IRR) for late-stage biopharma pipelines rose to 7% in 2025, up from 5.9% in 2024, according to Deloitte's sixteenth annual "Measuring the Return from Pharmaceutical Innovation" report. However, this improvement is disproportionately driven by a small cohort of mega-value assets, primarily GLP-1 (search) drugs, creating what analysts describe as a potential "bubble" effect.
GLP-1 Dominance Reshapes Industry Landscape
GLP-1 (search) assets, primarily targeting obesity (search) and diabetes (search) but also spanning indications such as chronic heart failure (search), osteoarthritis (search) and liver fibrosis (search), now account for an estimated 38% of projected commercial inflows from the 2025 late-stage pipeline. When GLP-1 drugs are excluded from the analysis, projected IRR falls dramatically to just 2.9%, revealing the underlying weakness in broader R&D productivity.
"While the headline figures suggest a robust recovery in R&D productivity, our analysis uncovered an industry wide critical dependency on GLP-1 (search) drugs that could create a 'bubble' effect," said Colin Terry, Life Sciences partner at Deloitte. "This concentration of value into a few mega-blockbuster drugs, while exciting, exposes the industry to risk once launched."
For the first time in 16 years of analysis, obesity (search) assets now account for approximately 25% of total forecast late-stage pipeline sales, displacing oncology (search), which dropped to around 20% in 2025 from 26% in 2024. In 2022, obesity drugs represented just 1% of pipeline value.
Rising Costs and Value Concentration
Average forecast peak sales per asset increased to $598 million in 2025, up from $510 million in 2024, with the uplift overwhelmingly attributable to high-forecast GLP-1 (search) assets. If GLP-1s were excluded from the analysis, average peak sales would drop to $353 million.
Simultaneously, the average cost to develop a drug from discovery to launch increased to $2.67 billion in 2025 from $2.23 billion in 2024, representing an increase of half a billion dollars per asset and raising the bar for commercial success.
The industry's future value is increasingly concentrated among a small number of major drugs. In 2025, 54 blockbuster assets—representing about 9% of the late-stage cohort—are projected to generate approximately 70% of total risk-adjusted peak sales.
"The degree of concentration we're seeing is unprecedented as a small number of assets can lift the entire industry's ROI," commented David Chapman, Life Sciences director at Deloitte. "However, it comes with greater competition and sensitivity to clinical, regulatory, or market access shocks."
Shift Toward Novel Mechanisms and Large Molecules
The analysis shows the value share of assets with "novel" mechanisms of action rose sharply to 53% in 2025 from 35% in 2024, with value highly concentrated among the top 10 novel mechanisms of action, primarily GLP-1 (search) combinations, which capture approximately 60% of the value in the "novel" tier.
The late-stage pipeline continues shifting toward large-molecule modalities such as monoclonal antibodies (search) and protein therapeutics (search). In 2025, large molecules account for 55% of late-stage assets (up from 51% in 2024) and are projected to generate 64% of total value (up from 45% in 2024), largely at the expense of traditional small molecules.
Strategic Implications and Risk Factors
With obesity (search) assets driven almost exclusively by GLP-1s now the dominant value driver, portfolios, particularly among the highest-performing companies, are becoming more sensitive to therapeutic-area-specific shocks. The analysis points to risks including tightening pricing and market access, rising competitive intensity, unexpected safety signals, and manufacturing supply constraints within the GLP-1 (search) space.
"To help them make today's gains durable beyond the GLP-1 (search) wave, leaders should consider connecting strategy to dynamic capital allocation, embed competitive reality into progression and deal decisions, and evolve AI investments from isolated projects to an end-to-end operational vision focused on measurable outcomes and workflow transformation," said Pete Lyons, U.S. Life Sciences sector leader, Deloitte US.
Innovation sourcing remains a meaningful contributor, with externally sourced assets making up 61% of the pipeline by volume and contributing 43% of total projected value in 2025. Rare disease (search) assets account for 36% of late-stage pipeline volume and are projected to contribute 18% of total late-stage pipeline value.
The report analyzed the top 20 companies by 2020 R&D spend, tracking biopharma R&D productivity since 2010 using an objective methodology focused on each company's late-stage pipeline.