Shares in AbbVie were climbing today after the company revealed that it has settled litigation with generic drugmakers and should prevent generic competition for its big-selling Rinvoq brand in the US.
In a Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) filing (PDF), AbbVie said it had reached an agreement with “all generic manufacturers” challenging the patents on Rinvoq (upadacitinib), which keep generics of the drug off the market until April 2037. Shares in the company were trading up more than 4% at the time of writing.
The identity of the generic drugmakers was not revealed in the document, but AbbVie has been in patent litigation with several manufacturers, including Aurobindo, Hetero Labs, Intas Pharmaceuticals, Sandoz, and Sun Pharma.
Oral JAK inhibitor Rinvoq was first approved in the US in 2019 as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, and has since had its indications expanded to include psoriatic arthritis, atopic dermatitis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, ankylosing spondylitis, axial spondyloarthritis, polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and giant cell arteritis.
It has grown substantially to become AbbVie’s second-largest product, with sales rising more than 48% in the first half of the year to reach nearly $3.75 billion, with the US market contributing the lion’s share (around $2.7 billion) of that total.
Alongside top-selling drug Skyrizi (risankizumab), Rinvoq has become a critical brand for AbbVie in helping it to recover from the loss of patent protection for Humira (adalimumab), a TNF inhibitor that at its peak in 2022 made more than $21 billion in annual sales – more than a third of group revenues – before biosimilars entered the US market the following year.
Humira is still a blockbuster – contributing just over $1.5 billion in the first six months of 2025 – but its decline has been swift. Earlier this year. AbbVie said it was raising its combined sales expectations for Rinvoq and Skyrizi in 2027 to $31 billion, with Rinvoq expected to contribute $11 billion to that total.
AbbVie is now gunning for its tenth and eleventh indications for Rinvoq, in alopecia areata and vitiligo, with the comfort of knowing that its market exclusivity for the drug in the US should now extend beyond 2033, which had been viewed as potentially the year generics would launch.
The 2037 date highlighted by AbbVie does depend, however, on Rinvoq being granted additional protection in exchange for completing trials of the drug in children.
