AbbVie’s flagship brand Humira continued its stellar performance last year to retain the top spot in the PMLiVE Top Pharma List ranking of the industry’s 50 biggest products.
The ranking, produced exclusively for PMLiVE by GlobalData, showed Humira (adalimumab) powered its way to the top of the 2013 chart on the back of sales that grew 20 per cent to $11.5bn.
Described early on in its life as a ‘pipeline in a product’ by its manufacturer, due to its potential in multiple lucrative indications, Humira’s recent performance was assisted by new uses in areas such as ulcerative colitis and psoriasis.
The rheumatoid arthritis drug managed once again to keep at bay two of its fellow anti-TNF inhibitors, Johnson & Johnson’s Remicade (infliximab) and Pfizer/Amgen’s Enbrel (etanercept).
It also means that once again all of the top three products were biologic treatments, a category that is expected to show continued growth.
Elsewhere in the Top Pharma List’s latest product rankings there was confirmation of strong performance from Sanofi’s Lantus (insulin glargine), sales of which grew 15 per cent to $7.3bn last year.
Double-digit sales growth was also seen from Pfizer’s fibromyalgia drug Lyrica (pregabalin), which GlobalData said made sales of $4.8bn in 2013, in the process overtaking Lipitor to become Pfizer’s best-selling product.
The once-mighty cholesterol brand has been in free fall since it began to go off-patent in 2011 and generic competition had already cut a swathe through Lipitor’s 2012 sales, which were reduced by more than half to $4.8bn. The decline was slightly less pronounced in 2013, but sales were still down by about a third to $3.1bn.
• Visit the full PMLiVE Top Pharma List. It includes rankings of the 25 biggest companies and the full top 50 products ranking