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

To: Sonki who wrote (4591)	7/24/1998 2:49:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9523

Viagra sales in Japan $1 billion potential: Friday July 24, 1:53 pm Eastern Time Pfizer sees Viagra launch in Japan by 1st half '99 NEW YORK, July 24 (Reuters) - Pfizer Inc. said Friday it planned to launch its blockbuster impotence drug Viagra in Japan by the first half of 1999, surprising some analysts who had not expected it to be sold in the Asian country for several years. Henry McKinnell, president of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Group, told Wall Street analysts that Japan had promised to grant an accelerated review of the company's application to market the drug in that country, one of the world's biggest markets for prescription drugs. Earlier Pfizer said it had filed the Japanese application for Viagra on Friday. ''I think we'll be on the market (in Japan) in the first half of next year,'' said McKinnell, who added that the cost of the drug will be reimbursable to health-care providers in Japan. McKinnell said he expected Viagra to be launched in Europe by late August or early September, with some countries expected to allow reimbursement and others refusing to allow it. Karen Katen, executive vice president of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Group, told analysts she expected sales of Viagra to begin stabilizing and possibly increasing in the United States in coming months, noting that U.S. sales had been decreasing since the week of May 8. New weekly prescriptions of the drug peaked the week of May 8 at 303,000 but declined to 184,000 the week of July 10. The drug has broken all sales records for a newly launched drug and is expected to have sales of at least $1 billion during its first year on the market, according to industry market research company IMS Health. Katen said Pfizer would bolster its sales force by about 900 people in the fourth quarter, 700 toward primary care doctors and 200 toward specialists, to support its portfolio of drugs including Zoloft and Viagra. The additional sales representatives would constitute a 25 percent increase over the 3,834 existing ones. McKinnell said Pfizer had high hopes for Celebra, a candidate pain and arthritis treatment that it plans to co-market for the drug's developer, the G.D. Searle unit of Monsanto Inc.(MTC - news) Monsanto has said it plans to seek U.S. market approval for Celebra, a new class of drugs that works by inhibiting the so-called Cox-2 enzyme linked to inflammation, by this summer. McKinnell said he expected the label of the drug to indicate ''significant benefits on the safety side'' compared with current non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as aspirin, which in many patients cause bleeding and ulcers. Pfizer on July 9 reported second-quarter profits of $628 million, a 38 percent increase from the 1997 quarter, helped by Viagra sales of $411 million. Still, sales by its consumer health care group fell by 11 percent to $120 million. McKinnell told analysts that the company was ''unlikely to significantly expand our consumer business'' other than through internal growth of current products. Although Pfizer can celebrate its many successes this year, including Viagra and second-quarter earnings, it noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June told the company it would not approve a candidate antipsychotic Zeldox without additional clinical data concerning a possible cardiovascular side-effect of the drug. Pfizer filed a new drug application (NDA) for Zeldox last September. Dr. Craig Saxton, executive vice president of Pfizer research, said the FDA told Pfizer it was concerned that the drug caused ''a very slight increase'' in the so-called QTc interval in the heart which is a sign of possible risk of causing arrhythmia. He said the FDA has required Pfizer to design a new clinical trial of the drug to assess the possible QTc risk. He said the protocol for the trial has not yet been designed and that Pfizer will be unable to refile an NDA for the drug until late 1999 because of the time it will take to design and carry out such a trial. Saxton presented data that he said showed that other commonly prescribed antipsychotics on the market have similar effects on the QTc interval. Salomon Smith Barney analyst Mark Striker said the biggest news from the analyst meeting was that Viagra was expected to be launched in Japan by the first half of 1999. ''We were not expecting it to be launched in Japan for a few years,'' Striker said, speculating that one reason Japan is moving so quickly to consider the drug application is because Viagra is already being sold there at high prices on the black market. Some analysts have estimated that sales in Japan could quickly reach hundreds of millions of dollars annually and possibly have a $1 billion potential. biz.yahoo.com