
Total U.S. pharma and biotech product sales 5 years after launch 2007-2021
Pharma and biotech products
New pharmaceutical and biotechnology products have generated increasingly large amounts of revenues during the five years after launch. In 2008, revenues were at 5.6 billion U.S. dollars but had skyrocketed to some 34 billion U.S. dollars in 2017. The average cost of developing a new pharmaceutical or biotech entity has increased from 400 million U.S. dollars in the 1980s to some 2.6 billion U.S. dollars nowadays. Many companies that had once focused primarily on pharmaceuticals have begun to integrate biotechnology in their research, which has minimized the separation between the two industries.
Pharmaceuticals are most commonly manufactured through chemical synthesis processes while biotechnology pharmaceuticals are products created within living organisms such as bacteria and yeast. Recently, biological drugs have become the most prominent products in the medicinal industry. For example, Humira, otherwise known as adalimumab, was approved in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2008. Humira is marketed by AbbVie and is used as an anti-inflammatory drug. It has since become one of the largest grossing medical products in the world, generating over 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.