Sales rise for AbbVie
pharmafile | April 30, 2013 | News story | Sales and Marketing | AbbVie, Abbott
AbbVie has released its first financial results as a standalone company since separating from Abbott as an $18 billion biopharma company in its own right.
The two firms formally split apart at the start of the year, and – comparing the performance of those drugs now allocated to AbbVie from the first quarter of 2012 – AbbVie saw a sales rise of 3.7% to $4.3 billion.
But while the company name has changed, the key driver has not: rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira saw sales rise 16% worldwide in part because of the global launch of its ulcerative colitis indication, and including a 23.7% jump in the US due to growth in dermatology and gastroenterology.
Humira is a vital asset for the North Chicago-based company: earlier this year AbbVie issued two injunctions against the European Medicines Agency to prevent the regulator revealing data about it.
In 2012 the drug had sales of $9.3 billion, up 16.8% on 2011. Yet although it has eight indications in Europe and seven in the US, its US patent expires in December 2016.
This is a problem because $2.1 billion – virtually half – of AbbVie’s overall sales in the quarter came from the US market, and Humira in all turned over even more than that: $2.2 billion.
Indeed, when you strip out Humira, sales for the first three months of 2013 begin to look less rosy with the performance of other big-sellers a potential cause for concern.
Chief among these was TriCor/Trilipix, which plummeted 49.6% due to the end of patent protection.
“The business generated strong sales growth despite loss of exclusivity in our lipid franchise,” insisted AbbVie chief executive Richard Gonzalez.
Yet anti-HIV treatment Kaletra was fairly flat, down 0.9%, while prostate cancer drug Lupron suffered a 9% fall.
However, net profit for the quarter was $968 million, up from $883 million the previous year and AbbVie is making strenuous efforts to develop other revenue streams.
“We advanced our promising pipeline during the first quarter, with continued progress across our mid and late-stage development programmes,” said Gonzalez.
R&D accounted for 14.6% of sales in Q1, a mixture of investment in that pipeline and the relentless pursuit of even more indications for Humira, including in Crohn’s disease.
Elsewhere in development are a Phase III hepatitis C programme, plus Phase 2b studies of elagolix in uterine fibroids and Phase III for endometriosis.
AbbVie has also started additional Phase 2b studies of ABT-719, a novel investigational compound for the prevention of acute kidney injury which the company expects to reach Phase III in 2014.
Adam Hill
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