If you’d like to raise eyebrows during an earnings call, announce a steadfast goal to reach $50 billion in sales for your oncology franchise by the end of the decade. That’s what executives at Johnson & Johnson did yesterday, vaulting well past analysts’ forecasts. Despite pulling in just $12 billion from the cancer therapeutic area in the first half of 2025, company leaders put all their chips on the table.

Dr. John Reed, executive vice president of R&D at J&J Innovative Medicine, pointed to a long lineup of potential candidates that could feed into that lofty mission.

“We’ve had really great momentum in the oncology pipeline,” Reed said. “In the last year and a half, we’ve had eight proof-of-concept readouts that gave us the confidence to now move into late-stage, pivotal studies across the portfolio.”

Today, we’re exploring J&J’s impressive second-quarter earnings results that come as the pharma giant absorbs a major blow to revenue from competition to the blockbuster Stelara.

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