Pfizer Sees ‘Golden Age’ in Alzheimer’s, Cancer Drugs (Update1)
April 07, 2010, 2:55 AM EDT
(Adds number of drug trials in seventh paragraph.)
By Simeon Bennett
April 7 (Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc., the maker of Viagra and the world’s biggest-selling drug Lipitor, said it expects to have more products with sales in excess of $1 billion as it develops treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and pain.
“We’re in the golden age of drug discovery,” Martin Mackay, president of pharmaceutical research at the New York- based company, said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Singapore. “We have a very replete pipeline in key areas such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, pain and inflammation” and infectious diseases.
Pfizer needs new products as it faces the November 2011 patent expiration of Lipitor, which accounted for $11.4 billion in sales last year, more than one-fifth of revenue. The company, the world’s biggest drugmaker, is also betting on treatments it got by buying rival Wyeth for $68 billion in October.
Nine of the company’s drugs sold at least $1 billion last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, qualifying them as “blockbusters.”
Mackay cited new products including tasocitinib for rheumatoid arthritis as among those that will replace lost revenue from cholesterol-controlling Lipitor. He also said the company will increase the variety of products it sells rather than try to replace one blockbuster with another.
‘Single-Digit Growth’
“The strategy at Pfizer is to be a very solid growing company, albeit with single-digit growth, and be a diversified company which not only has pharmaceuticals and new pharmaceuticals coming out of R&D, but nutritionals, consumer products, animal-health products, and the like,” Mackay said. “To contemplate double-digit growth is going to be difficult over the next period,” he said, referring to sales growth.
As of the end of last year, Pfizer had 26 drugs in phase- three trials, a final stage of testing required for U.S. approval, compared with eight at the end of 2007, Mackay said. That doesn’t include the treatments it got from Wyeth, he said at a briefing at the company’s research unit in Singapore.
Following the acquisition, Pfizer cut its research portfolio to 500 projects from 600, as it focuses on accelerating the development of drugs with a “big, early” effect in patient studies while weeding out the losers earlier in the process, Mackay said.
“Flatliners are flatliners, and they kill us unless you find them really early,” Mackay said. “In the next few years I think you’ll see less attrition, more survival of our compounds, and taking that attrition earlier.”
Clinical Trials
The company runs about 600 trials worldwide each year, including about 90 in phase one, the first stage of human testing, Mackay said. Of those, 23 were done last year in Singapore, a figure Pfizer wants to increase by about 10 percent this year as it tests more treatments for Asian populations.
Pfizer today said it will collaborate with closely held MicuRx Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Union City, California, and China-based Cumencor Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop antibiotics for drug-resistant tuberculosis in China. Pfizer will pay an undisclosed upfront fee, fund the discovery and development of the antibiotics and make payments linked to marketing the products, it said in a statement.
China has more than 25 percent of the world’s multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, Pfizer said, citing the World Health Organization.
--With assistance from Shannon Pettypiece in New York. Editors: Dave McCombs, Phil Serafino
To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lena Lee at llee42@bloomberg.net. |
