Moderna sits a tier below and is contracting. Its FY2025 10-K, filed February 20, 2026, reports R&D expense of about $3.1 billion for 2025, down from roughly $4.5 billion in 2024 and a peak of about $4.8 billion in 2023 — a two-year decline that this desk covered separately.
At the clinical-stage end, the scale changes entirely. CRISPR Therapeutics' FY2025 10-K, filed February 12, 2026, reports full-year R&D of about $285 million — roughly a hundredth of Regeneron's peak budget. That is the structural difference between a profitable, multi-product biologics company and a focused gene-editing platform still funding toward its first wave of products.
Lilly anchors the top of the range. Its FY2025 10-K, filed February 12, 2026, frames tirzepatide and a broad cardiometabolic and oncology pipeline — the kind of late-stage portfolio that sustains a large-cap pharma R&D base. The takeaway from aggregating these four: 'R&D spend' means radically different things at radically different balance-sheet scales, and only the filings let you compare like with like.
The methodological caution this desk insists on: these are absolute R&D figures across different fiscal years and accounting conventions, not a normalized R&D-as-percent-of-revenue ranking — and three data points across companies of different size is a comparison, not a trend.
Every R&D figure above is a reported GAAP line item drawn from the companies' primary SEC filings, surfaced through EdgarBeast as a filing-data index and quoted from the respective 10-Ks on sec.gov.