AbbVie is an American publicly traded biopharmaceutical company founded in 2013 as a spinoff of Abbott Laboratories.
The company is a speciality biopharmaceutical company that discovers develops, manufactures and commercializes drugs for the treatment of complex and chronic illnesses. Its drugs are used for the treatment of metabolic diseases, rheumatological Diseases, neurological diseases, viral diseases, skin diseases, complications sociated with cystic fibrosis, pain related to endometriosis, disease of the gastrointestinal tract, various types of cancer and other serious health conditions. The company is also advancing its pipeline programs for the treatment of cystic fibrosis, women’s health, various cancers, neurological disorders, and other autoimmune diseases. The company distributes its products directly to wholesalers, healthcare facilities, government agencies speciality pharmacies and independent retailers through its own distribution centres and public warehouses all over the world. The company’s headquarters is located in north Chicago, Illinois, United States. The company has a revenue of 56.20 billion[2021] and an employee strength of 50,000 employees [January 2022].
On October 19th 2011, Abbott Laboratories reported plans to separate into two publicly traded companies. The new Abbott Laboratories would specialize in diversified products including diagnostics facilities, nutrition products and medical devices, while AbbVie Would operate as a research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer. This separation was done on January 1st 2013 and Abbvie Was listed officially on the New York Stock Exchange on January 2nd 2013 just two days later.
According to Myles white, the CEO at that time the reason for the split of the company was to allow markets to value the two companies separately. Some of their investors were actually concerned about the split because of the speculation that the split was done to protect the value of the device company from losing facing the drug division because of the expiration of patents on Humira, which accounted for almost half of the drugs division’s revenue.
In the amount of December 2015, the company employs 28,000 Staff globally and provides products to individuals in more than 170 countries.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Israeli government announced its intention to force the company to license its patent for Kaletra the brand name of lopinavir, and ritonavir, a fixed-dose combination drug for the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS which was said to have some applicability to fight the cover 19 viruses. In response to this, the company announced that it would eliminate patent enforcement on the drugs entirely.
In 2021 June, the Senate Finance committee under the chairmanship of Ron Wyden began an investigation to find out if the company used the tax cuts and JOBS Act of 2017 to buy back its own stock using income saved by the tax law. In a letter to the CEO of AbbVie Richard Gonzales, Wyden pointed out that the company suffered a pretax loss in 2020 in the US amounting to a sum of $4.5 billion and had an overseas pretax profit of $7.9 billion. Why didn’t they accuse the company of shifting revenue to avoid taxes in the US?
According to the Wall Street Journal in 2016 ibrutinib, a speciality drug had a cost of $106,600 2 $155,400 yeah wholesale in the US. In spite of the discounts are medical insurance, the prohibitive price made some patients avoid filling their prescriptions. The company estimated worldwide sales of the drug at $1 billion in the year 2016 and $5 billion in 2022.
In 2018, the company started litigation against NHS England claiming that their procurement rule had been breached and the company hadn’t been treated fairly during what was said to be the single largest medicine procurement ever done by the NHS for hepatitis C treatments. In 2019 the case was dismissed by the court. The company still remains focused on the product development of cystic fibrosis disease medication, despite this success that I’ve been made by their main competitor in that area vertex.
AbbVie collaborations.
On the 10th of February 2016, AbbVie and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Synlogic reported a multi-year R&D partnership. Synlogic is a synthetic biology company built based on the research from the labs of James Collins and Tim Lu at MIT. As part of the partnership, AbbVie got global rights to the synthetic biology company’s probiotic-based technology for treating inflammatory bowel disease and the research team that’s focused on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. In April of that year, the company established a partnership with the University of Chicago to investigate some areas of oncology: breast, lungs, prostrates, colorectal, and haematological cancer.
The company also announced that month that it will commercialize Argen’x preclinical Immunotherapy. The company also announced the deal to co-establish and commercialize at least one of CytomX Probody’s conjugates against CD71 [transferrin receptors].
In March 2020 the company announced its plan to evaluate the Kaletra/ Aluvia HIV medication as a possible treatment for COVID-19. The company went into several partnerships with health authorities in different countries to investigate the efficiency of the drug. The drug’s efficiency to COVID-19 came out negative.
Controversies
Humria is a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and other autoimmune diseases. Since the drug’s release in 2003 AbbVie has increased the price by more than 470% making the annual supply cost rise to $77,000. It also increases the price of imbruvica a drug used to treat cancer by 82% since its launching in 2013. Presently the drug is priced at 181,295 dollars. For patients taking four pills per day, it costs 242,039 dollars.
In 2018, the company made an agreement to pay $25 million to resolve allegations of his use of kickback schemes to promote the cholesterol drug Tricor. In 2020 the company paid $24 million to resolve another allegation of using a kickback scheme but this time to promote Humira using nurse ambassadors.
Opioid crisis
The company in July 2022 agreed to pay up to $2.37 billion to settle United States lawsuits concerning the opioid crisis. The allegation against the company in this opioid crisis scheme was about the company distributing more than the allowed number of painkillers into the country. Or into this case the company stock was reported to have fallen by 6% when the company agreed to pay lumpsum.
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