As Amgen’s flagship PCSK9 cholesterol drug Repatha enjoys a bit of a renaissance on the back of impressive cardiovascular risk reduction data last year, the company is confident it can keep that momentum running well past the end of the decade.
And together with a slate of other products and portfolios tipped to drive major growth, Amgen was able to outpace the declines from biosimilar competition to key brands Prolia and Xgeva once more in the second quarter, in a performance that one company exec expects to “inspire confidence with our investors and shareholders.”
Taking a look at Amgen’s overall performance between April and June, sales climbed 10% to reach $10.1 billion, with product sales specifically up 9%.
Touting the breadth of its commercial portfolio, the California pharma pointed in an earnings release to 22 of its brands delivering at least double-digit sales growth in the quarter and 17 products that are slated to secure more than $1 billion in full-year sales, as portended by their performance in the second quarter.
Leading the pack remains the more than 10-year-old cholesterol and heart med Repatha, which charted an impressive 37% increase year over year to reel in $953 million in second-quarter sales.
Apart from the raw sales increase, new-to-brand prescriptions for Repatha were up 50% year over year in the quarter, Murdo Gordon, Amgen’s EVP of global markets and policy, said in an interview with Fierce.
“The growth is being driven primarily by cardiologists who are already using Repatha, using more of it for more patients,” Gordon explained, “And in primary care, we’re seeing an increase in depth of prescribing, particularly for diabetes patients, where your cardiovascular risk is very, very high compared to a patient who does not have Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes.”
Earlier this summer at the American Diabetes Association’s 2026 Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, Amgen presented subgroup findings from last year’s Vesalius-CV study that looked at Repatha in roughly 6,000 patients with high-risk diabetes and elevated LDL-C—also known as “bad” cholesterol—who hadn’t had a prior heart attack or stroke.
In those results, patients who received Repatha on top of statins or other LDL-C-lowering therapies had a 29% lower risk of coronary heart disease death, myocardial infarction or ischemic stroke compared with placebo.
Moreover, Repatha reduced the risk of a second composite primary endpoint, which included ischemia-driven revascularization, by 21%.
That sub-study is just one of several catalysts that have come together to keep Repatha on its winning streaking more than a decade into its commercial lifespan, Gordon noted.
In particular, the landmark Vesalius-CV data Amgen first presented last November showed that Repatha could chart “profound decreases” in cardiovascular risk in patients who hadn’t previously had a heart attack or stroke, and in particular, the PCSK9 inhibitor was tied to a 36% decrease in myocardial infarction risk, which Gordon referred to as a “surprisingly good number.”
“We had high expectations for the trial, but the results are so consistent across the board,” Gordon said. “And since the primary publication, we’ve had a diabetes sub-study publication, and we’ve had a PCI—or percutaneous coronary intervention—sub-study presented, also showing consistent double-digit reductions in cardiovascular risk.
“So, what we’re seeing now,” Gordon continued, “is an attitude in the market where Repatha is really the first add-on therapy to high-intensity statins to further lower LDL to get LDL into the 50s in terms of milligrams per deciliter, which is what we achieved in Vesalius.”
As it stands, the American Diabetes Associations’ cholesterol guidelines for primary prevention target less than 70 mg/dl for patients, with Gordon noting that Amgen thinks “those guidelines need to be updated.”
Overall though, the “prevailing wind,” as Gordon described it, “is to be more aggressive in LDL lowering with therapies that are proven to reduce cardiovascular events, which of course only Repatha has done in secondary prevention and in high-risk primary prevention—no other PCSK9 has done that.
On the broader PCSK9 inhibitor scene, Repatha’s chief rivals include Regeneron and Sanofi’s Praluent and Novartis’ Leqvio.
Meanwhile, the FDA a few days ago approved Merck & Co.'s Lipfendra as the first oral PCSK9 drug. Analysts have pegged the once-daily cholesterol med could reach $5 billion in peak sales.
As for the slow approach of potential biosimilar challengers to Repatha, Gordon noted that Amgen continues to “expect to be able to grow Repatha beyond the end of the decade.” While the company hasn’t given too much detail on its strategy to extend Repatha’s patent lifespan, Gordon pointed to other cardiovascular metabolic products in the company’s pipeline that could yield “combination strategies” with its flagship PCSK9.
Meanwhile, Amgen’s own extensive experience playing in the biosimilar space should help the company know what to expect when that form of competition rears its head on Repatha, he added.
Looking at Amgen’s second quarter performance overall, Gordon noted that he expects the numbers to “inspire confidence with our investors and shareholders,” insofar as the company continues “to outpace the decline side of our business with the growth side.”
While Amgen is certainly feeling the sting of biosimilar competition to its bone med Prolia and cancer asset Xgeva, the company’s growth drivers—comprised of Repatha, Evenity and Tezspire, among others—are now contributing 70% of Amgen’s revenues, per Gordon.
For its part, Evenity charted sales gains of 38% to $714 million in Q2.
Amgen also reported increases across its rare disease business, where thyroid eye disease med Tepezza grew sales 14% to $576 million, gout drug Krystexxa jumped 15% to $400 million and anti-CD19 treatment Uplizna continued to come into its own with a staggering 90% year-over-year growth to reach $335 million in Q2.
Meanwhile, as Amgen seeks to defend the market position of its ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) drug Tavneos in the U.S., the rare disease med grew 36% to $150 million. Amgen noted that it continues to back Tavneos’ efficacy and safety profile as it engages with the FDA on the matter.
As for the timing on Amgen’s impending hearing with the FDA over the drug, inherited from its Chemocentryx acquisition, “we just don’t know,” Gordon admitted.
As for Tavneos’ current position in the U.S. market, Gordon said Amgen is supporting doctors “with the best information we can give them.”
Gordon added that “rare disease is a small community of physicians and patients,” noting that “it’s very important that we stay very close to those patients and to those physicians at this point in time because of the uncertainty around the medicine.”