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Novartis is a giant drug company that invents and sells prescription medicines for cancer, heart disease, and other serious illnesses.
Novartis is one of the world's biggest makers of prescription drugs. It does not sell pills to shoppers on a shelf; it sells medicines to hospitals, doctors, insurers, and governments, usually at high prices, and it spends billions inventing them in the first place. Its heart is a handful of blockbuster drugs, including Entresto for heart failure, Cosentyx for immune diseases like psoriasis, and a fast-growing cancer portfolio built around drugs such as Kisqali and Pluvicto.
The money math is unusual. It can cost well over a billion dollars and many years to get one drug approved, and most attempts fail. The winners have to pay for all the losers, which is why a successful patent is so valuable: the company sells it exclusively for years, then faces cheap generic copies when the patent expires. That cliff is the constant threat hanging over the business, so Novartis is always hunting for the next big medicine to replace the last one. It spends roughly $9 billion to $10 billion a year on research and development to keep that pipeline full. Novartis has been reshaping itself into a purer medicine company. It spun off its eye-care business, Alcon, years ago, and in 2023 it separated its generics arm, Sandoz, so it could focus on patented drugs. It also made a big bet on radioligand therapy — radioactive drugs that hunt cancer cells — by acquiring companies behind treatments like Pluvicto, and it bought Anthos Therapeutics to add a heart drug. One notable miss: it walked away from a $1 billion deal to buy Cytokinetics after the heart-drug data disappointed.
The company generates enormous cash and returns much of it to shareholders, mainly through a rising dividend and large share buybacks — a way of shrinking the share count so each remaining share owns more of the profits. Its main rivals are the other global drug giants, like Pfizer, Merck, Roche, and AstraZeneca, all fighting for the same doctors and the same patent-protected pricing power.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026