Since Roche launched Babismo, a long-acting eye disease treatment, in 2022, Bayer and Regeneron have hit sales of competing treatments Eylea, further hurting the U.S. biotech.
Bayer has been able to keep Eyrie’s annual sales relatively stable, as they have hovered between 3.1 billion euros and 3.3 billion euros over the past four years, respectively. But biosimilar competition is hitting German companies with all their might as the year draws to a close.
In the first quarter (PDF), Bayer’s Eylea sales were 623 million euros ($731 million), down 24% year over year. It was also down 11% quarter over quarter. This is not surprising, as Bayer expects Eyrie sales to decline by 20% to 25% this year.
But it wasn’t all bad news for Bayer’s Eylea franchise. Chief Financial Officer Wolfgang Nickel said the long-acting 8mg formulation of Eylea now accounts for 46% of the company’s overall Eylea sales, and that “volume development continues to be successful.”
“We continue to see pricing pressure from the entry of biosimilars into the market, particularly around price,” Nickle added.
The company expects sales to continue to decline this year, but Stefan Orlich, president of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, said he also expects “some sustainability of Eyly’s business” with the eventual adoption of the 8mg option.
Bayer held off Eylea’s decline longer than Regeneron, whose sales plummeted from $6 billion in 2024 to $4.4 billion in 2025. Last month, the New York drugmaker reported that its macular degeneration drug generated $941 million in the first quarter, the first time in eight years that quarterly sales were below $1 billion.
Bayer last week offered a potential answer to its declining presence in the eye disease market by acquiring San Francisco-based Perfuse and its PER-001 medium-term eye disease implant. Bayer will pay $300 million upfront and the deal could include additional milestones of $2.15 billion.
“We need to look at this not just as a commercial play, but as something that leverages the knowledge that we have in this field. When I talk about knowledge, it’s on the science side as well, but it’s also on our KOL network, which will hopefully set up appropriate and rapid late-stage clinical development of this new drug,” said Erlich. “Also keep in mind that we don’t have a commercial infrastructure for ophthalmology in the United States, so we need to build a lot of infrastructure.”
Bayer also felt the brunt of a sharp decline in sales of its anticoagulant Xarelto, which fell 43% in the quarter, and overall sales for the company’s pharmaceutical division fell 7%.
It was a symbolic passing of the torch for Bayer, as its new top-selling product is Nubeqa. Prostate cancer treatment surpassed Eylea and Xarelto, generating 749 million euros ($879 million) in the quarter, up 45% from a year earlier. Another growth centerpiece for Bayer, the cardiovascular and kidney drug Kelendia, saw sales rise 70% to $274 million ($321 million) in the first quarter.
Bayer’s other two business units, Crop Science and Consumer Health, beat expectations in the first quarter, with sales flat. As a result, Bayer’s stock price rose 4%.
