Boehringer Ingelheim has continued its rise up patient groups’ ranking of rare disease companies, adding to last year’s gains to cement its status toward the top of the leaderboards. But the German drugmaker failed to crack the top three of the full table, which the same three companies occupied again.
PatientView generated the rankings, surveying 502 rare disease patient groups about their views on individual companies and pharma in general from December 2025 to March 2026. Ranking drugmakers that they were familiar with, patient groups catapulted (PDF) Boehringer up another four places on the leaderboard, adding to the seven places it gained (PDF) in the previous survey.
Despite the back-to-back jumps, Boehringer again fell outside of the top three. As in the previous survey, Sobi, Roche and BioMarin took the top three spots, in that order. The number of patient groups familiar with Sobi rose from 213 to 225 between the two surveys.
Boehringer occupied a leadership position in the three other cuts of the PatientView data. Asked to rate companies they work with, patient groups again put Sobi and Roche in the top two spots, but Boehringer took third place at the expense of BioMarin. Boehringer was second among Big Pharma companies that patient groups were familiar with or work with, trailing Roche on both rankings.
The German drugmaker took second place on the list of Big Pharma companies that patient groups work with after climbing six spots. Boehringer knocked AstraZeneca down to third place, tied with Sanofi. The company’s six-place jump was among the biggest leaps up any of the leaderboards. Viatris rose 17 spots on the list of companies the groups work with, and Alnylam climbed six places on the familiar-with list.
Overall, the patient groups’ perceptions of the pharma industry improved in the latest survey, bringing the sector’s corporate reputation up to a level last seen in 2022. Over the past five years, patient groups have reported improving perceptions of the industry’s transparency around clinical data, pricing and funding of external stakeholders.
The areas of improvement have historically been weaknesses for the industry. Pricing transparency has been a particular problem, with more than half of patient groups rating the industry as poor in that area in the previous survey. The proportion of groups rating the industry’s pricing transparency as good or excellent fell from 17% in 2020 to 16% in 2024.