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

To: Mkilloran who wrote (6813)	1/26/1999 1:13:00 PM
From: Little Gorilla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9523

(You go MikeKoz!!!) As for PFE, does anyone know anything about Tikosyn? Thursday, Jan. 28 9 a.m.: Advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration considers a new drug application for Tikosyn capsules (dofetilide) from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Production Corp. (PFE) for abnormal heart rhythm, at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

To: Mkilloran who wrote (6813)	1/26/1999 4:14:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9523

15:59 T CNBC's FABER REPORT: Monsanto's Celebrex Running Strong The following report was aired Tuesday on CNBC-TV by CNBC reporter David Faber: "It may be too early to celebrate, but the early data from sales of Monsanto's new drug, Celebrex, are running very strong. NDC Health Information Services tracks daily prescriptions and reports that Celebrex, the drug to treat pain in Arthritis patients, is off to a better start than even that of Lipitor, Warner-Lambert's treatment for high cholesterol, which started strongly and kept going to become No. 1 in its category. Take a look. In the first eight days prescriptions were written, Celebrex has easily beaten numbers put up by Lipitor. If this trend continues, it will come in second only to the giant, Viagra, for the amount of early prescriptions that were written. Monsanto's management had cautioned analysts not to draw conclusions from the prescription data until late February. The company had given away one month supplies of the drug to thousands of physicians in hopes of seeding the market. Independent analyst Hemant Shahs says the company's comment was meant to deflect what might have been anemic early sales data since the market had already been seeded. But this early prescription data is just that, it does not include the giveaways. While estimates vary, analysts are looking for 1999 sales of Celebrex to be around $600 million and $1 billion in the year 2000. Unlike Lipitor, Celebrex is the only competitor in its category, a new class of pain medications known as Cox 2 Inhibitors. Monsanto's GD Searle unit and its co-marketer, Pfizer, received clearance to sell Celebrex at the end of last year from the FDA. But the drug did not get the labeling originally sought, which would have also said it does not cause gastrointestinal distress. Still, as Shah points out, with 35 million people suffering from various forms of Arthritis and the fact that many of them are getting less efficacy from current medication, the market, therefore, is quite large. That market will be joined ostensibly this year by Merck, which is counting on its Cox 2 Inhibitor, Vioxx, to carry its growth burden in coming years. Shah says that in many ways these drugs show efficacy similar to that of Ibuprofin in the mediation of inflammation and pain. Because people develop immunity to drugs such as Ibuprofin, Shah says the Cox 2 Inhibitors will be used, and from the early look at prescriptions, they may be used an awful lot." (END) DOW JONES NEWS 01-26-99 03:59 PM