AbbVie's Humira is still on top, but biosimilars are chipping away at its dominance
The cracks in AbbVie’s once-impregnable armor have come mostly from a partnership between Sandoz and CVS’ private-label drug unit Cordavis. CVS’ move in September to start preferring Sandoz’s Hyrimoz has given the drug 13% of the market.
But according to Samsung’s latest quarterly report, the other nine Humira biosimilars have captured just 5% of the total market.
The issue isn’t price. Nine of 10 Humira biosimilars now have list prices that are at least 80% less than AbbVie’s brand-name version, and six biosimilars are priced at an 85% or better discount.
In addition to Cordavis, the report notes how Intermountain Healthcare’s Scripius plans to remove brand-name Humira from its formularies for all commercial business on Oct. 1. Other PBMs and insurers may follow suit and remove Humira from more formularies, opening more space for biosimilars.
The market for Humira and its competitors is one of the biggest examples of the complicated relationship between brand-name drugmakers, PBMs and biosimilar competitors, which is coming under increasing scrutiny in Washington, but also by employers who pay for the benefits. Earlier this week, the FTC released an interim report looking at PBM practices that hinted at further scrutiny of those relationships in the future.
Samsung’s new report also digs into the FDA’s recent shift on interchangeability, opening it up for more biosimilars without conducting switching studies.
For Boehringer Ingelheim’s Humira biosimilar Cyltezo, the first interchangeable exclusivity dates were determined as 18 months from the approval date, Samsung explains, but separate dates were assigned to different strengths. The last of that exclusivity expired last September, according to the report, and moving forward, the FDA is looking to eliminate the statutory distinction between biosimilars and interchangeable biosimilars.
The small shares for the vast majority of Humira biosimilar developers show how this market may be too crowded. Coherus BioSciences recently announced the sale of its Humira biosimilar for just $40 million, only three years after it won FDA approval.
What is Abbvie's Humira?

2023 sales: $14.4 billion
Disease: Rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, plaque psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurativa and uveitis.
While AbbVie largely played it cool in the face of a steady stream of Humira biosimilars last year, the onslaught of copycat biologics ultimately caught up to the autoimmune megablockbuster in the final stretch of 2023.
Humira, also known as adalimumab, once sat atop the throne as the world’s bestselling prescription medicine, prompting AbbVie to deploy its infamous “patent thicket” to protect the drug’s sales for many years. Still, Humira’s supremacy was never fated to last forever, and, following the debut of the first FDA approved Humira biosim—Amgen’s Amjevita—last January, a successive wave of summer launches gradually eroded Humira sales in the back half of the year.
For all of 2023, Humira brought home worldwide revenues of $14.4 billion, representing a 32% drop from the $21.2 billion sum the drug generated in 2022. The pace of erosion kicked up a notch during the final quarter of 2023, when Humira sales plunged nearly 41% to $3.3 billion globally.
At the top of 2023, Amgen deployed its biosimilar Amjevita, which came equipped with several months of biosim exclusivity on the U.S. market thanks to a 2017 settlement with AbbVie. But AbbVie hadn’t thrown in the towel just yet, with the company’s soon-to-retire CEO Richard Gonzalez noting at the 2023 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that his company was well prepared to fight the competition and had secured broad 2023 formulary access for Humira with “all of the major” players.
Soon after, in February 2023, Gonzalez told investors that while it was still early days, his company was “comfortable with how things [were] playing out” in terms of biosimilar competition. At the time, he said that the most “significant impact” on Humira going forward would be the price.
By the end of 2023’s second quarter, Humira’s sales had slipped 25%, though Gonzalez continued to stress that the situation was playing out “as projected, and slightly better than our planning assumptions."
Following Amgen’s Amjevita rollout, a tranche of additional Humira biosimilars hit the scene last summer, including Boehringer Ingelheim’s Cyltezo, Sandoz’s Hyrimoz, Biocon’s Hulio and Coherus BioSciences’ Yusimry.
According to a September survey from Spherix Global Insights, Humira over the course of 2023 faced “continued erosion” in favor of a “growing embrace of these diverse biosimilars.”
Still, Spherix cautioned that prescribers had “not wholly warmed to these newcomers,” pointing out that dermatologists in particular showed the “highest degree of stated resistance to change,” while rheumatologists reported the least actual erosion to AbbVie’s brand-name drug.
While AbbVie escaped 2023 with the Humira situation largely as expected, the branded offering took a hit more recently on April 1, 2024, when CVS Caremark removed AbbVie’s drug from its national commercial formularies in favor of biosims.
To help weather the biosim assault, AbbVie is looking to its immunology up-and-comers Rinvoq and Skyrizi to pick up the slack. Earlier this year, company executives predicted the meds would generate $16 billion in 2024 and exceed more than $27 billion by 2027.
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