With an approval apiece, the verdict is still out on AbbVie’s and BMS’ twin neuro buys

Earlier this fall, the FDA approved AbbVie’s Parkinson’s disease drug Juvmo—formerly tavapadon — prompting analysts and observers to revisit the pharma’s $8.7 billion takeover of Cerevel Therapeutics, along with a parallel transaction: Bristol Myers Squibb’s $14 billion buyout of Karuna Therapeutics. But at least one analyst says it’s too early for a reckoning on either transaction.

“It’s still early days, but as of today, I don’t think there’s a clear winner,” Graig Suvannavejh, managing director and senior biotech and biopharma analyst at Mizuho Securities, told BioSpace.

Less than a year after AbbVie bought Cerevel in December 2023, the centerpiece of the buyout, schizophrenia drug emraclidine, failed two Phase 2 studies. The news sent the pharma’s shares crashing 12% and led analysts to question its decision to move on Cerevel. The failure looked even worse given that competing schizophrenia candidate KarXT, which BMS picked up in its acquisition of Karuna Therapeutics just two weeks after AbbVie’s Cerevel play, had just won the FDA’s blessing and entered the market as Cobenfy, the first novel schizophrenia drug in more than three decades.

But with Juvmo’s approval, and Cobenfy struggling to meet sales expectations, the ultimate value of both deals is looking less clear cut.

Matt Phipps, group head of biotechnology equity research at William Blair, agreed that AbbVie’s buy is not down for the count yet. “At the time of the Cerevel acquisition no one was really thinking about tavapadon,” he told BioSpace in an email. Its September approval “clearly should offer some support” for the deal, he added.

Meanwhile, Cobenfy has long disappointed. After exceeding expectations in the fourth quarter of 2024, its first full quarter on the market, the drug began to slip. In 2025, Cobenfy brought in $155 million in sales, less than half of some analysts’ initial predictions, Suvannavejh previously told BioSpace, and sales continued to miss expectations in 2026.

“I’m not sure anyone would declare victory there,” Suvannavejh said of Cobenfy’s sales to date. “You certainly don’t want to pay $14 billion to get that kind of sales trajectory.”

As for AbbVie’s Cerevel buy, he added, the pharma gained a pipeline beyond emraclidine—and it is still working on that asset as well.

Cobenfy’s tolerability troubles

In addition to the timing, the size of the deals and the neuro focus of both, the AbbVie and BMS deals are often put in the same bucket because the schizophrenia assets that starred in those transactions both act on the muscarinic receptors. It’s difficult to pinpoint where Cobenfy went wrong, but Suvannavejh flagged its safety profile as one issue.

“I think that is part of the reason why Cobenfy commercially has not done that well because . . . the side effects, the GI adverse events, are likely to be in the real world much worse than what was reported in the Phase 3 studies.”

MapLight CEO Christopher Kroeger agreed.

“The challenge with Cobenfy has been that it is not proven to be particularly tolerable,” Kroeger told BioSpace in August. Because Cobenfy’s components—the muscarinic agonist xanomeline and the muscarinic antagonist trospium chloride—have to be in exquisite balance, there can be high interpatient variability, he added.

Even as Cobenfy’s market uptake continues to be a challenge, BMS is pushing the drug forward in Alzheimer’s disease psychosis, positioning it as a safer option versus current antipsychotics on the market, most of which have boxed warnings for an elevated risk of death in older patients with dementia.

But readouts from the ADEPT program studying Cobenfy in this indication keep being pushed back, impeded by enrollment problems and the slow accrual of outcome events. BMS had originally expected data from the ADEPT-2 trial by the end of last year, but announced in December 2025 that the results would instead come by the end of this year. In July, BMS disclosed another delay for the program, with CEO Chris Boerner saying on the company’s second quarter earnings call that topline data readouts from ADEPT are now anticipated in early 2027, with a potential interim analysis for ADEPT-1 later this year.

While delays to readouts don’t necessarily mean that those studies failed, Suvannavejh indicated it’s not something analysts regard positively.

BMS is also studying Cobenfy in bipolar mania, Alzheimer’s disease agitation, Alzheimer’s disease cognition and pediatric autism irritability.

Cerevel: A riskier bet

Cobenfy may be struggling on the market, but for Suvannavejh, AbbVie’s Cerevel acquisition was always the riskier of the two bets.

In December 2023, when both deals went down, Karuna was farther along in the drug development journey. Cobenfy, still known as KarXT at the time, already had two Phase 3 studies under its belt, both of which had demonstrated the drug’s benefits. Meanwhile, Cerevel’s emraclidine had only cleared Phase 1b testing and was still wrapping up two registration-enabling Phase 2 studies. This is possibly what enabled Karuna to be sold at a higher valuation, Suvannavejh explained.

“AbbVie, I guess, jumped the gun and said, ‘Well, we have a lot of confidence that the Phase 2/3 data will be positive,’” he continued. While the earlier-stage asset may have saved AbbVie a few billion dollars, the pharma gambled by “buying something that’s less derisked.”

But the book isn’t closed on emraclidine just yet. AbbVie is studying the molecule in a Phase 2 trial in adults with schizophrenia. The asset is also in early-stage development for psychosis, with data for both indications slated for this year.

Of the Juvmo approval, Suvannavejh said it’s difficult to predict peak sales, and noted that a lot of Parkinson’s drugs, which are mostly symptomatic treatments, “don’t tend to be blockbuster products.”

William Blair projects Juvmo to make $1.4 billion in 2040. Even assuming the drug’s peak sales were to reach four to five times the firm’s estimate, Phipps is unconvinced it will justify AbbVie’s Cerevel buy.

“You probably aren’t fully justifying the take out price of Cerevel,” he told BioSpace. “So I think many people would say they overpaid, but at least were fortunate to have it not be a complete zero.”

Editor’s note: Heather McKenzie contributed reporting to this piece.