Slumping Drug Stocks Get Some Adrenaline
Posted by Sarah Rubenstein
April 7, 2008, 3:11 pm
Some drug makers whose shares have been suffering lately are seeing some rebounds today.
In midday trading, shares of Merck and Schering-Plough, dogged lately by the Energizer bunny of a Vytorin controversy, were up 4% and 5%, respectively. Meanwhile, Wyeth was up 6%. Novartis was bucking the trend, down 3% after the company said it will acquire a majority stake in Alcon.
On the Vytorin front, it appears prescriptions of the drug and sister cholesterol medicine Zetia didn’t collapse completely after the rough American College of Cardiology panel a week ago Sunday. A report from UBS says prescription figures from last week are “very encouraging.” Well, that’s if you consider a drop in the drugs’ market share last week of 9% compared with the week before. UBS is projecting their share will drop about 30% compared to what they were before the ACC meeting.
Meantime, investors may be excited over Wyeth’s Alzheimer’s drug in development, Raymond James analyst Michael Krensavage and UBS analyst Roopesh Patel tell the Health Blog. Barron’s, three floors down from Health Blog HQ, just ran a positive article about it. Wyeth, which has been beset by pipeline problems and generic competition, also gave an encouraging forecast for growth of its vaccine business, which includes pneumococcal vaccine Prevnar, in a recent interview with the Pink Sheet, Merrill Lynch noted today. Separately, Wyeth announced it’s expanding a nutritional manufacturing facility in Singapore.
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