Humira’s Best-Selling Drug Formula: Start at a High Price. Go Higher.<br />“I literally couldn’t go away from the house or very far from a bathroom, 20, 25 times in the bathroom all day<br />long, I can’t imagine living like that,” she said, adding, “I was becoming a hermit because I was so sick.”<br />Humira, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of AbbVie’s $25.6 billion in revenue in 2016, was not simple to develop.<br />The industry has argued that high American prices are needed to fund drug development,<br />but a 2016 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found “no evidence of an association between research and development costs and prices; rather, prescription drugs are priced in the United States primarily on the basis of what the market will bear.”<br />Competitive pressures have been muted.
