As Johnson & Johnson rode out 2026’s third quarter, leveraging its pharmaceutical segment to navigate medtech headwinds, much of the company’s near-term excitement has turned to IL-23 pill Icotyde, which has been hailed as a potential game changer in plaque psoriasis.
J&J has yet to report out discrete sales for Icotyde, or icotrokinra, though the company on Tuesday cited the medicine’s uptake in the U.S. as one driving factor in the 1.3% year-over-year increase in immunology revenue it posted for Q3, during which the unit collectively brought home (PDF) more than $4.2 billion.
“We do foresee Icotyde to be one of our biggest assets in innovative medicine, and it’s off to an incredibly great start,” Tom Cavanaugh, worldwide chairman of innovative medicine at J&J, said of the performance on the company’s earnings call Tuesday.
Since the drug’s approval and launch earlier this year, J&J has recorded more than 20,000 patient starts on Icotyde, funneled through a pool of nearly 9,000 prescribers, Cavanaugh said, noting that the performance is “absolutely tracking better than most all launches in psoriatic disease.”
The green light specifically covers the use of Icotyde to treat moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis in patients ages 12 years and older who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy.
At the time of approval, J&J’s then-innovative medicines chief, Jennifer Taubert, opined that Icotyde could set a “new standard” for treatment of the moderate to severe form of plaque psoriasis, which is estimated to affect some 8 million people in the U.S.
Taubert announced her retirement earlier this year and was formally replaced by Cavanaugh at the innovative medicines helm on Sept. 1.
Once-a-day oral Icotyde also boasts a potentially meaningful convenience edge over most other systemic psoriasis treatments, like AbbVie’s Skyrizi or J&J’s sister medicine Tremfya, which often come in the form of injections.
Further breaking down the Icotyde launch mix on Tuesday’s call, Cavanaugh explained that around 60% of those new patients are brand-new to a systemic plaque psoriasis treatment, with the remaining 40% comprising a relatively even split between people switching from orals and those coming over from other treatments, which mainly consist of biologics.
As the launch continues to play out in psoriasis, Cavanaugh reiterated that many more opportunities lie ahead for Icotyde, which J&J plans to bolster with two upcoming phase 3 readouts in psoriatic arthritis and in a head-to-head against its own Stelara, plus potential expansions further down the line in indications like inflammatory bowel disease.
The J&J exec stressed that the company is “expecting similar results with regards to launch performance as we go into those other indications.”
Though investors and industry watchers will have to wait a while longer for Icotyde sales to report out, “I’m confident we’re going to be doing that next year, just based on the momentum and the progress that we’re seeing with the launch,” Cavanaugh added later during the call.
All told, J&J lifted sales by 5.9% in the third quarter to reach total revenues of $25.4 billion, which analysts at Leerink Partners noted fell in line with consensus. Overall, innovative medicines contributed around $16.8 billion to the haul, up from around $15.6 billion for the period in 2025, while the company’s medtech segment grew 2.5% year over year to a little more than $8.6 billion.
Immunology remained the major growth driver overall for the period, primarily thanks to psoriatic and IBD medicine Tremfya, which reported sales of $2.4 billion in Q3, above the estimate put forward by analysts at TD Cowen.
Other key J&J products that exceeded TD Cowen’s expectations for the period included Stelara, Carvykti and Caplyta, to name a few, while medications like Rybrevant, Spravato and Darzalex missed the analyst shop’s targets.
Meanwhile, buoyed by its recent quarterly performance, J&J raised the lower end of its full-year sales guidance. The company now expects revenue to fall between $101 billion and $101.4 billion, versus its previous forecast of $100.8 billion to $101.4 billion.