BMS Resets 2023 Guidance With Bigger Than Expected Drop In Revlimid Sales

Bristol Myers Squibb Company has been on a multi-year mission to develop medicines that can fill revenue gaps created during this decade as its top-selling drugs lose patent exclusivity, sometimes taking two steps forward and one step back, as drug developers often do. But with its second quarter 2023 earnings report, the big pharma appears to have taken a bigger stumble – one step forward and two steps back – with double-digit growth for its new products but a much larger than expected decline in Revlimid (lenalidomide) sales, and not simply because of increasing generic competition.

Sales of the multiple myeloma blockbuster and follow-on myeloma therapy Pomalyst (pomalidomide) plunged so far in the second quarter that BMS lowered its overall revenue guidance for 2023, saying that the company now expects sales to decline by a low single-digit percentage rather than grow by 2% this year. CEO Giovanni Caforio explained that while Bristol expects Revlimid sales of $5.5bn in 2023 versus prior guidance of $6