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Biotech / Medical : PFE (Pfizer) How high will it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BigKNY3 who wrote (1259)	4/19/1998 6:09:00 PM
From: BigKNY3	Respond to of 9523

News from San Francisco NEWS Virility pill sales skyrocketing Viagra has become best-selling new drug ever in U.S. Just 10 days after reaching pharmacy shelves, the new Viagra impotence pill has become the fastest-selling drug ever launched by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. More than 15,000 prescriptions are being written each day by overwhelmed physicians who, in some cases, are being inundated with requests from patients they haven't seen in months but who are responding to the tremendous publicity about the pill. "These are huge numbers, and this is by far the biggest launch ever," said securities analyst Hemant Shah of HKS & Co., which tracks the drug industry and obtained the data Friday from NDC Health Information Services, a market-research firm. The surge in demand helped Viagra surpass the record for a new drug established last year by Lipitor, a wildly successful cholesterol fighter. In its first two weeks on the market, only 7,000 Lipitor prescriptions were written. Now it's so popular that about 29,000 prescriptions are written daily, according to NDC. By way of comparison, the most widely prescribed brand-name drug is Premarin, an estrogen replacement, for which more than 114,000 prescriptions are written daily. And nearly 62,000 prescriptions are written daily for the depression buster Prozac, NDC data indicates. It's too early to know whether demand for Viagra, which is made by Pfizer Inc., will continue at this rate. In clinical trials, the pill worked for nearly 70 percent of patients with some form of erectile dysfunction. That's a fairly high success rate, and such strong initial interest has Wall Street betting Viagra will soon be a billion-dollar seller. Last year alone, the number of patient visits to doctors regarding impotence reached 2.8 million, a 16.6 percent increase, according to market researcher IMS America Ltd. And the market for Viagra may grow bigger still if its benefits are tested successfully for women. Beyond the men who may be contacting their doctors for the first time in months, the exceedingly large number of prescriptions being written suggests that many others are, for the first time, acknowledging they have a problem.