Skyrizi
AbbVie's Skyrizi snatches sales crown from Humira as company lifts full-year profit guidance
The Chicago-area drugmaker saw sales climb 3.8% on a reported basis to $14.4 billion during the third quarter. It’s a new era for AbbVie. For the first time in years, the company has a new top sales driver as Skyrizi has overtaken Humira in quarterly sales.
Humira heir Skyrizi has been slowly creeping up on the once-dominant Humira ever since biosimilar competition prompted the immunology king's decline. With Skyrizi sales skyrocketing 50% to $3.2 billion during the third quarter, the drug took the sales crown from Humira, which has been trending down and generated $2.2 billion during the period.
Skyrizi holds biologic share leadership in approximately 30 countries and boasts a “best-in-class profile” that presents a “very high bar” for rivals, AbbVie's chief commercial officer Jeffrey Stewart said on the company's third-quarter earnings conference call.
After Skyrizi's recent debut in ulcerative colitis, feedback and initial prescription trends have been “overwhelmingly positive,” Stewart added. The crowded ulcerative colitis market recently gained another competitor in Johnson & Johnson’s Tremfya, setting up a fierce fight for dominance between the pharma giants. However, Skyrizi has a leg up with its prior Crohn’s disease nod, which represents the second form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
AbbVie’s Rinvoq, meanwhile, is also indicated to treat both forms of IBD as well as a range of other immunology conditions, including psoriatic arthritis. In IBD, Rinvoq uptake is “exceeding our expectations,” Stewart said.
And after Rinvoq bested Regeneron and Sanofi’s powerhouse Dupixent in a head-to-head atopic dermatitis study, AbbVie’s offering is positioned as a formidable competitor in a “highly underpenetrated market,” Stewart added.
Rinvoq raked in $1.6 billion during the quarter, an increase of 45%, and together with Skyrizi should pull in revenues of more than $17 billion this year. This projection comes in $1.3 billion above the company’s initial expectations, AbbVie CEO Robert Michael noted on the Wednesday conference call.
The duo’s strong showing prompted AbbVie to again crank up its full-year earnings-per-share outlook to $10.90 to $10.94, up from its second-quarter estimate of $10.67 to $10.87. The company’s immunology portfolio in full contributed $7 billion to AbbVie’s total quarterly sales haul of $14.4 billion.
Still, AbbVie isn’t done pitting its immunology meds against other market leaders. The company has an ongoing head-to-head study comparing Skyrizi to Bristol Myers Squibb’s Sotyktu in psoriasis and plans to go after Takeda’s Entyvio next with another head-to-head in ulcerative colitis.
Outside of immunology, the company recently nabbed a long-awaited FDA approval for its Parkinson’s disease therapy Vyalev, a follow-up to its 2015 infusion pump Duopa. With a non-surgical, continuous delivery system, the drug has the potential to “significantly expand use” beyond current device-aided therapies, Stewart said. U.S. sales are expected to gradually ramp up over the next few quarters as the company works on Medicare coverage. The products' revenues should eventually hit more than $1 billion, according to the company.
