When looking back at one of the most disruptive years in biopharma in recent memory, several obvious trends appear right at the forefront. One, the industry’s top players are contending with a web of U.S. government initiatives intended to lower prices, including the Inflation Reduction Act and President Donald Trump’s “most-favored-nation” push.
Readers couldn’t get enough of those stories this year, resulting in several ranking among our top 50 stories by reader traffic. Our most-read story of the year came in November when Medicare revealed price reductions for some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. Along the same lines, when Trump signed an executive order in May focused on reducing U.S. prices, you all took note.
Moving to another topic, layoffs dominated our coverage—and our audience’s interest—throughout the year. Among the large drugmakers cutting roles, stories on restructuring moves at Merck, Bayer, Novo Nordisk and Bristol Myers Squibb each appeared in our top 50 this year.
Personnel moves reliably garner great traffic, and 2025 had some unforgettable developments on that front, as well. In this category, GSK’s surprise announcement in September that CEO Emma Walmsley was stepping down captured the most reader interest, followed by some of the enthralling drama at the FDA.
But, really, this industry is all about innovation. In this category, readers took special note of FDA approval stories focused on Merck’s subcutaneous Keytruda, Vertex’s novel pain medicine Journavx and GSK’s new antibiotic Blujepa.
Some of our most-read stories of the year don’t fit neatly into these categories but are still worth examining again. These include responses to DEI policy shifts in Washington, a twist in the long-running saga of bluebird bio and the compounding industry quarrel that took the stage at the Super Bowl.
As for special reports, we produced several throughout 2025 that are worth revisiting with your spare time during the holidays. Here are several of our favorites from this past year:
Lastly, this time of year provides an opportunity to look back and see what we got wrong and right from a year ago. Among our forecast stories for 2025, our writers predicted a continued government crackdown on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, a supply rebound for GLP-1 giants Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly and larger M&A deals after a prior lull. Other pieces cited uncertainty around artificial intelligence, supply chains and politics, plus ongoing disruptions to the clinical trial industry.
Each of those has clearly taken place this year in biopharma—to varying degrees—so it was gratifying that despite all of the moving pieces in this industry, we could still guide readers to some actionable forward-looking information.
We hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll see you back here with our normal schedule starting Jan. 2. Until then, we’ll do our best to get some rest while staying on top of breaking news.