Pharmaceutical giant AbbVie was threatened by the FDA in December, 2017 for not properly handling complaints that its drugs had been the cause of several deaths that had not been reported to the agency. The FDA had conducted an inspection of AbbVie’s main manufacturing plant in Chicago earlier in 2017, where they learned of five deaths tracible to the company’s best-selling drugs. Eight to eleven more deaths per drug can now be attributed to AbbVie’s top sellers, plus the five that the FDA was already aware of, according to the Form 483 report obtained by STAT (Read their article about it [HERE]). The drugs under scrutiny are Humira, a drug used to treat arthritis, and Venclexta, which is used to treat chronic leukemia. Venclexta is usually used in conjunction with Rituxan as a supplemental form of therapy.
The company is criticized for not investigating these claims thoroughly enough, and this is mirrored through the conduct at the Chicago manufacturing plant. Many of the practices taking place in the factory were not up to the FDA’s standard. For example, AbbVie employees failed to test reserve samples of their drugs to see if the active ingredients were still functioning properly. They were also scrutinized for having no documentation of investigating the death complaints that the plant had received.
The FDA termed AbbVie’s handling of the complaints “inadequate.” A spokesperson for the drug company stated “[they] investigated all complaints where a death has occurred during the use of our products.” This, however, is clearly contradictory to the FDA’s reporting.
Humira is AbbVie’s best-selling drug; it made the company $18.5 billion of the company’s total revenue of $28.2 billion in 2017(roughly 65%). The arthritis medication is only slated to go up in consumption over the next several years.
Despite the malfeasances of AbbVie, the FDA has not formally sanctioned them, and it is unknown if they plan to at this time.
