This Is Expected to Boost AbbVie’s Growth Prospects

AbbVie (ABBV) expects the global immunology market to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 6% until 2025, driven mainly by increasing biologic penetration across multiple indications and various geographies.

The company and EvaluatePharma have projected major indications in the rheumatology segment, including rheumatoid arthritis (or RA), psoriatic arthritis, and ankylosing spondylitis, which could offer a market opportunity of close to $29 billion, $10 billion, and $8.0 billion, respectively, for targeted immune modulators (or TIMs), by 2025.

AbbVie expects key indications in the dermatology segment such as psoriasis and atopic dermatitis to be worth $17 billion and $7.0 billion for TIMs by 2025.

The gastroenterology segment is expected to offer a market opportunity of ~$11.0 billion for Crohn’s disease and $7.0 billion for ulcerative colitis to TIMs by 2025. The company aims to target this growing market with three solid assets: Humira, Upadacitinib, and Risankizumab.

AbbVie expects to keep dominating the immunology space, despite increasing competition from peers Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Pfizer (PFE), and Amgen (AMGN). Notably, AbbVie accounts for 1.2% of the iShares Russell 1000 Growth ETF’s (IWF) total portfolio holdings.

AbbVie expects its investigational immunology assets, risankizumab and Upadacitinib, to play a pivotal role in advancing the standard of care for multiple autoimmune indications.

On September 11, 2017, AbbVie announced that its investigational oral JAK1-selective inhibitor, Upadacitinib (ABT-494), has reached all primary as well as secondary ranked end points in the phase-3 Select-Beyond clinical trial, which evaluated the therapy for patients who were suffering from moderate to severe RA and who failed to respond sufficiently or could not tolerate biologic DMARD therapy.

The drug managed to report efficacy for both the 15 mg and 30 mg doses after 12 weeks and demonstrated sustained clinical response at the end of 24 weeks.

In the next part of this series, we’ll discuss Upadacitinib’s growth prospects in greater detail.