Amgen CEO Bob Bradway joins 'Mad Money' host Jim Cramer to talk its rare disease business, its weight-loss drug offering, what is in Amgen's pipeline, and more.
Questions asked in this interview
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4:34Now isn't it true that there is no level that's too low for bad cholesterol?
We got some new data from Amazon on Veritide, their latest stage once a month GLOP-1 weight loss injection. Now, Wall Street didn't react to the news, but this is big biotech that's been able to pull off some major drug launches in recent years. So, let's take a closer look with Bob Braley. He is the chairman and CEO of Amgen. You get a better sense of what's going on here. Mr. Bradley, welcome back to Manboy.
All right. Now, first we just got to address what people have been saying about your GOP-1 versus what the truth is. And the truth is it's entirely possible that maybe you could get to once a quarter. It's entirely possible that you can stop it and lose weight. You are doing different things from Lily. And I want things put it in context.
Well, this is the first long acting medicine for obesity and obesity related conditions and potentially type two diabetes. So, we have a drug that we're studying as a once monthly injection. And we've said that we expect it can be used monthly or less frequently. We've shown what it looks like when it's used every 8 weeks. And we shared yesterday that we're very encouraged about the data for when it's used quarterly as well. And so, we think a bunch of ways to win for patients when it comes to maritide and maintaining weight loss. And we think we can address one of the reasons that the field is struggling a little bit, which is the patient persistence issue.
Right? Meaning they drop off. They just drop off and there's a two year maintained weight loss. This is an industry publication just came out after your presentation and that would be rather remarkable.
Yeah. So we have studied now over 104 weeks across a range of different doses to better understand what we think the appropriate way is to maintain weight loss. So we know that we can induce a very impressive weight loss over the first 52 weeks and we're going to study that right through 72 weeks and then we want to understand how do we help people maintain that weight loss over the long term and we want to understand what will it take for patients to stay on this therapy. Because persistence is the name of the game. The benefit comes from being on therapy.
And the drugs provide tremendous benefit but only when the patients are on the drugs. And so again we think maritide has the potential to be the first long acting medicine addressing the needs of patients living with obesity or overweight.
But I do want to point out I mean you've got so much going on you've got a lot of drugs you made an acquisition by the way that you know I I champion Horizon because I just said they had great stuff but they didn't have the scale you have basically blown out what I thought were going to be orphan drugs actually they're going to be drugs for many people.
Yeah. Well, our rare disease business is performing very well. Over the course of the last year, we were annualizing at north of 5 billion dollars, growing at double digit growth rates. And we're very excited about what we do.
No one was thinking that could be it. You know, that when you were bought, people thought you paid too much money because no one thought that these would ever altogether add up to that much.
Well, the acquisition is working very well for us and partly because it plays to our strengths, biologics and autoimmunity. So the medicines we acquired address autoimmune conditions and are largely biologics and are at an early stage of their life cycle. And so we're continuing to explore ways and new diseases that might benefit from these treatments. And so far so good. We're very encouraged by what we've seen.
Now I want to talk about one of the most important drugs ever or it should be Rapatha. I take it.
Why do I take it? Because my doctors at NYU said, 'Look, you want to cut the risk of stroke, you want to cut the risk of a cardiac event, you have to be on it. We insist on it.' At first, I said, 'No, it's too expensive.' But you put down the cost of it so low, maybe everyone should be taking it.
Well, we've lowered the list price of Rapatha twice. Rapatha is a medicine that profoundly lowers LDL cholesterol. LDL is the bad cholesterol. So we profoundly lower LDL and in doing that profoundly reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke. So for example a few weeks ago we demonstrated that in people who'd never had a heart attack if we put them on Rapatha on top of what was considered optimized therapy we were able to further reduce the risk of heart attack in fact by 36% for people in this study. So Rapatha has helped characterize the benefit of bringing the bad cholesterol down to levels that previously weren't achievable with medicines that were otherwise available in the marketplace.
14 more exchanges in this transcript
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Bradway, R. (2026, January 13). Amgen CEO Bob Bradway goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637876/
MLA
Robert Bradway. "Amgen CEO Bob Bradway goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer." CNBC Television, 13 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637876/.
BibTeX
@misc{bradway2026_637876,
author = {Robert Bradway},
title = {Amgen CEO Bob Bradway goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637876/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
