Dive Brief:
- AbbVie Inc. surprised investors Thursday, reporting first quarter revenue that was ahead of market estimates due to higher-than-expected sales from its hepatitis C business.
- The North Chicago, Illinois-based pharma posted revenues of $7.9 billion for the three-month period, up 17% on an operational basis. As usual, the bulk of those sales came from it anti-inflammatory blockbuster Humira, which earned $4.7 billion.
- In an unexpectedly strong contribution, however, AbbVie's hepatitis C franchise brought in just under $1 billion during the quarter, outpacing Wall Street forecasts of only $571 million.
Dive Insight:
Unusually, AbbVie's earnings call on Thursday did not focus much on Humira (adalimumab), but instead on the company's R&D progress. While the Abbott spin-out has steadily built its portfolio over the last several years, investor focus remains centered on the fate of its biggest growth-driver. But analysts and investors seem comfortable with the Humira story — which is expected to grow through 2020, despite looming competition from biosimilars in Europe later this year.
Instead, focus shifted to some of the recent pipeline progress. Last month, AbbVie hit a pipeline roadblock when it announced it would not seek accelerated approval for it small-cell lung cancer drug rovalpituzumab tesirine, or Rova-T, in the third-line setting due to disappointing topline results from the Phase 2 TRINITY study. The company's stock shed nearly $30 billion of its market capitalization following that news.
Both analysts and AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez called the stock reaction to the Rova-T event "dramatically overblown." Gonzalez added that "reaction to TRINITY data was overdone by four or five times," and said that Rova-T is both the smallest and only asset "not de-risked" in the company's late-stage pipeline.
The company expects to finish the ongoing Phase 3 MERU and TAHOE studies as planned and will move forward with the compound based on those results.
Other questions from analysts centered around another recent setback for the pipeline — the Food and Drug Administration said in early April that it will need longer time to evaluate liver toxicity data related to its endometriosis drug elagolix. AbbVie execs reaffirmed their confidence in the drug and said that they still expect approval in the third quarter "based on their own reviews of the data."
Analysts also wanted to know how the recent Advisory Committee meeting regarding Eli Lilly & Co.'s JAK inhibitor baricitinib could impact AbbVie's own JAK inhibitor upadacitinib. AbbVie again reassured investors that it's confident in the safety profile of the drug and said that it would reveal the VTE and pulmonary embolism profiles of the drug once all data have been collected. (Check out BioPharma Dive's analysis of the JAK market.)