As Stelara biosimilars chip away at sales in Europe and off-brand rivals start to grace the stage in the U.S., Johnson & Johnson is confident it can eke out revenue growth this year despite the steady decline of one of its most prominent blockbusters.

Plus, patients’ desire to embrace newer therapies could help channel potential Stelara losses into prescriptions for newer immunology therapies, including J&J’s own Tremfya, company executives said on an earnings call Wednesday.

Surveying the next 12 months, J&J expects to chart roughly 3% sales growth to $91.3 billion in 2025 by “overcoming headwinds associated with U.S. biosimilar entries for Stelara,” as well as this year’s Medicare Part D redesign and continued macroeconomic pressures in China, CEO Joaquin Duato told analysts on the call.

Stelara biosimilars first hit the European market last summer, starting with Alvotech and Stada’s Uzpruvo. Throughout the second half of 2024, other drugmakers such as Sandoz and Celltrion also launched off-brand counterparts to Stelara in the bloc.

In the U.S., where patent litigation delayed the entry of Stelara biosimilars until this year, Amgen’s copycat Wezlana debuted on Jan. 1, according to reports. It will soon be followed onto the market by Stelara competitors from partners Teva and Alvotech, Fresenius Kabi and Accord BioPharma, as well as Celltrion and Sandoz.

Still, J&J doesn’t appear to be sweating the competition.

“I cannot think of any other company that would be able to deliver growth in the first year of losing exclusivity of a multi-billion dollar product,” Duato said of the Stelara situation. He attributed his high hopes to J&J’s business diversification, strong roster of commercial products and expected upcoming launches for drugs like Tremfya in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), plus Rybrevant and Lazcluze in lung cancer.

What’s more, J&J has reason to believe the advent of Stelara biosimilars could actually be a boon for its newer immunology contender Tremfya.

In terms of how Stelara’s loss of exclusivity is likely to play out, “we’ve talked about the Humira erosion curve being probably the best thing to model,” Jennifer Taubert, J&J’s worldwide chairman of innovative medicines, said on the call.

Taubert’s remarks came in response to an analyst inquiry about whether Stelara biosimilars could prompt a market shift toward Tremfya, like the situation that has played out With AbbVie’s Humira and its newer IL-23 inhibitor Skyrizi.

As with Skyrizi and Humira, Tremfya has gradually been adopting indications held by Stelara, such as psoriatic arthritis and—perhaps more importantly for J&J—ulcerative colitis. The company is also aiming for an upcoming Tremfya approval in Crohn’s disease, for which Stelara received an FDA nod in 2016.

“I think there are a lot of patients in the immunology market right now that are in need of advanced therapies or are in need of better therapies than they’re on now, and so we do see, across the board, shifting of patients and movement into the newer and better products,” Taubert said.

“I would put Tremfya squarely in that camp,” she added.

Overall, global Stelara sales dropped 14.7% year-over-year to roughly $2.3 billion in 2024’s fourth quarter. For the full 12-month earnings period, Stelara sales slipped around 4.6% to $10.4 billion. 

The company’s total fourth-quarter sales amounted to $22.52 billion worldwide, representing growth of 5.3% over the same period in 2023, J&J noted in a release. Full-year revenues grew 4.3% to $88.8 billion.

For all of 2024, J&J’s innovative medicines business grew sales 7.5% to $59.96 billion, with oncology the most lucrative division, followed by immunology, neuroscience, pulmonary hypertension, infectious diseases and finally the company’s cardiovascular and metabolism segment.

As for how the company plans to keep that innovation engine churning, Duato pointed to the value J&J places on M&A, noting that the drugmaker is “always looking for opportunities to be able to enhance our portfolio, our pipeline.”

The CEO pointed to the more than 40 deals J&J inked in 2024—plus last week’s $14.6 billion buyout of neuroscience player Intra-Cellular Therapies—as evidence of the drugmaker’s business development acumen.

Meanwhile, many of the smaller-scale transactions inked last year were tied to the company’s medtech business, Duato noted.

“You have to think that larger acquisitions, like the case of Shockwave or, in the innovative medicine side, Intra-Cellular, are more outliers,” the helmsman said, adding that J&J remains primarily interested in smaller deals.