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Bristol-Myers Squibb invents and sells prescription medicines, mainly for cancer and heart disease.
Bristol-Myers Squibb is a drugmaker. It discovers and sells prescription medicines, and its biggest business by far is cancer treatment — a field where a single successful drug can earn billions of dollars a year. Its most famous product is Opdivo, an immunotherapy that helps the body's own immune system attack tumors. It also sells blood thinners like Eliquis, plus medicines for heart disease and other serious conditions.
The business model is simple to state and brutal to live by. Invent a drug, win a patent, and sell it exclusively for years at high prices — often paid by insurers and government health programs rather than by patients directly. Then the patent expires, cheap generic copies flood in, and that river of money dries up. So a drug company must constantly refill its pipeline with new medicines, either by inventing them in its own labs or by buying other biotech firms that already have promising drugs. That explains the most important thing about Bristol-Myers: in 2019 it agreed to buy rival biotech Celgene for roughly $74 billion, one of the largest pharma deals ever. The prize was Celgene's blood-cancer drugs, including Revlimid, which became a major revenue source. Then in 2025 the company struck another huge deal, agreeing to pay about $40 billion for Karuna Therapeutics, which brought a new schizophrenia drug called Cobenfy. That purchase was a bet that the company can grow beyond cancer and refill its pipeline as older drugs lose patent protection — Revlimid has already been facing generic competition, and Eliquis faces the same cliff later this decade.
Bristol-Myers competes with giants like Merck, Pfizer, and Roche, all fighting for the same patients and the same hospital budgets. Its strengths are deep research, a broad cancer portfolio, and the cash flow to keep buying new science. Its vulnerability is the patent clock: no matter how good a drug is, the day it goes generic is coming. The company spends heavily on research and dividends, and it has been paying down the debt it took on for Celgene. The whole story of this business is a race — invent or buy the next big medicine before the old ones lose their power.
Saved answer · last researched 23 Oct 2026