Matej Mikulic
Research expert covering health, pharma & medtech
Top pharmaceutical drugs - Statistics & Facts
The global pharmaceutical market is to a large degree driven by its top pharmaceutical products. The same is true for the leading pharmaceutical companies, which generate a large share of their revenue from their top drug brands. For example, in 2023, AbbVie generated some 26 billion U.S. dollars with its top three pharmaceutical drugs, or almost 50 percent of its total revenue. This was, of course, still driven by its blockbuster product Humira.
The biggest: Humira and Lipitor
AbbVie's rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira is still among the world’s top medications based on revenue. In 2022, Humira generated over 21 billion U.S. dollars of revenue worldwide. But the following loss of patent exclusivity led to plummeting sales in 2023. Pfizer’s cholesterol drug Lipitor was by far the top global drug for years in the 2000s but yielded its position due to heavy losses caused, once again, by patent expiration. In the time of patent loss, between 2011 and 2012, Pfizer’s revenue through Lipitor declined by some 60 percent. Both, Humira and Lipitor, are still the leading drugs by lifetime sales worldwide. However, the leading drug in 2023 was Merck's cancer treatment Keytruda, with 25 billion U.S. dollars in global sales.Performance in the U.S. is essential
In the U.S., AbbVie’s Humira was also the top drug based on revenue in recent years, before losing its patent exclusivity. The drug generates the overwhelming part of its revenues in the United States, where prices for drugs are much higher. Due to their significantly lower prices, generics are always the top-selling pharmaceutical products when measured by dispensed prescriptions. In 2022, there were some 110 million prescriptions in the U.S. for the cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin – the generic version of the above-mentioned Lipitor.A new generation of blockbusters
Biotechnology is becoming more and more the leading technology within the pharmaceutical industry. Seven out of the ten most revenue-generating drugs worldwide are already biotech-derived. The three best-selling products in 2023 were biotech: Keytruda, Comirnaty, and Humira. Although not a drug in the classic sense, biotech-derived mRNA-vaccine Comirnaty was the best-selling pharmaceutical product of all times, based on annual sales. The COVID-19 vaccine was developed in cooperation of German-based BioNTech and U.S. giant Pfizer and generated nearly 38 billion dollars in 2022.
