While acknowledging that Teva’s peak sales estimate for its tranche of late-stage pipeline darlings may be verging on “aspirational,” at least one analyst team walked away from the company’s first R&D investor confab this week feeling “increasingly confident” in the firm’s direction.
That take from TD Cowen was predicated upon Teva outlining a “more complete bridge from the current innovative portfolio to a sustained cadence of new launches” on Tuesday as it gathered investors for the first R&D day in its history. The innovative and generic medicines hybrid telegraphed expectations to strike between $6 billion and $7 billion in innovative drug sales by 2030 and touted pipeline potential of more than $10 billion in sales at peak.
The meeting is a testament to the turnaround Teva has charted under CEO Richard Francis, who took the reins at the formerly ailing drugmaker in early 2023 and quickly sought to build up its pedigree in novel drugs while maintaining a generics and biosimilars focus in parallel.
Consistent with that strategy, dubbed Pivot to Growth, Teva on Tuesday affirmed that it will continue to use its stabilized off-patent revenues to fuel higher-return innovative drugs, with an eye toward both internal and external pipeline targets.
All things considered, the TD Cowen team noted that it “came away encouraged by the breadth of the pipeline and management's willingness to move capital quickly behind positive data while discontinuing lower-return programs.”
“Our internal pipeline has to compete every day against anything that could be happening outside,” Francis explained in a virtual interview with Fierce following the R&D day. “This is not about ours or theirs. This is about putting our money to good use. That will help patients in the future, and that will help Teva.”
Francis pointed to investor appetite for the event as a sign of significant changes at Teva in recent years.
“Normally in this industry … you don't get people asking you to do an R&D day,” he said.
But Teva’s “make-it-happen mentality, coupled with some of the real capabilities [the company’s] always had, has put us in the position today that we're talking about a pipeline, which takes literally an hour and a half to talk people through,” Francis said, adding that the interest in what his company’s got cooking under the hood “made me very proud.”
Taking a closer look at Teva's clinical plans, the company is pinning hopes on at least one innovative medicine launch per year through the end of the decade, beginning with the recent FDA nod for its long-acting schizophrenia offering Weltruza, which it expects to contribute to a combined $1.5 billion to $2 billion in potential peak LAI schizophrenia sales next to the 2023-approved Uzedy.
Starting next year, the company’s planned launch cadence is expected to hop from Tourette syndrome asset ecopipam and dexmedetomidine to Teva’s dual-action rescue inhaler (DARI) for asthma in 2028, followed by duvakitug in ulcerative colitis in 2029 before the medicine is pegged to round out its IBD label with a Crohn’s disease go-ahead in 2030.
For anti-TL1A inhibitor duvakitug in particular, Teva is holding onto pipeline-in-a-product hopes, eyeing further expansions down the line in hidradenitis suppurativa and fibrostenotic Crohn’s. Those two indications could help bring home sales between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, while duvakitug in IBD alone could reel in $2 billion to $5 billion at peak, per Teva’s calculus.
“While we primarily view these estimates as aspirational for the moment, the framework helps quantify the potential upside that remains beyond our current risk-adjusted estimates,” the TD Cowen team said in summarizing Teva’s overall pipeline sales forecast.
“Ultimately,” the analysts continued, “the diversified catalyst cadence, improving balance sheet, and increasing innovative mix are supportive of the long-term earnings and valuation story.”
In framing up the present moment, Francis told Fierce that “this is about the pipeline, the assets we've got, the commercial team we've got, the R&D team we've got,” stressing that “there's so much more to come.”
Teva is putting renewed focus on its pipeline shortly after reporting (PDF) third-quarter revenues of $4.4 billion, which were down 2% at constant currencies versus 2025. After a sustained run of sales growth, Teva cautioned at the top of the year that its momentum was expected to slow slightly in 2026.
The company attributed the decline for the quarter on continued competition in the generic Revlimid market, though it noted that innovative drugs helped pick up some of the slack.
Alongside the long-acting schizophrenia duo of Weltruza and Uzedy, Teva’s recent vanguard of novel drugs is headed up by tardive dyskinesia and Huntington’s chorea med Austedo—which generated $751 million (up 21%) for the quarter—and Ajovy for migraine prevention, which grew sales 61% to $269 million in Q3.
Earlier this month, Teva hiked up its 2026 guidance range for each of the brands, save for the newly debuted Weltruza.