DAVOS, Switzerland — Joint global efforts are finding it harder to win general support at the moment, but a nearly 20-year campaign to vaccinate children around the world was described as a success story at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.
The good news: Since its formation at the World Economic Forum in 2000, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance —a nonprofit that sells subsidized vaccines to the world's poorest countries — has helped to immunize some 700 million children against polio, cholera, measles and other diseases.
Global sales of Humira, the blockbuster drug that treats autoimmune diseases like arthritis and psoriasis, hit $19.9 billion in 2018, an 8.2% increase from 2017, AbbVie reported Friday. AbbVie has collected more than $115 billion in global Humira sales since 2010, 58% of which has come from the U.S.
The bottom line: AbbVie has made and will continue to make a lot of money from Humira. Butcheaper copycat versions in Europe are expected to erode sales by $2 billion this year, which sent AbbVie's stock reeling.
The World Health Organization says the cost of developing new cancer treatments doesn’t seem to justify those drugs’ high prices, as the pharmaceutical industry argues.
The big picture: "The costs of R&D and production may bear little or no relationship to how pharmaceutical companies set prices of cancer medicines,” WHO officials said in a recent research paper.
