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

To: Jim Lamb who wrote (7123)	3/2/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 9523

Monsanto Celebrex Prescriptions Reach About 224,000 a Week Bloomberg News March 2, 1999, 6:14 p.m. ET Monsanto Celebrex Prescriptions Reach About 224,000 a Week St. Louis, March 2 (Bloomberg) -- Monsanto Co.'s new arthritis drug Celebrex captured about 224,000 prescriptions in the week ended Sunday as Monsanto and its partner, Pfizer Inc., began a marketing campaign for the new painkiller. That's a 45-percent increase from the approximately 155,000 prescriptions filled in the previous week, according to NDC Health Information Services, a unit of Atlanta-based NDC Corp. NDC Health said it estimates the sales by polling several thousand U.S. pharmacies and then projecting what the national sales are. Celebrex is the first of a new class of painkillers that appear to work without irritating the stomach as do older drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen. Since the drug was introduced in mid-January, more than 600,000 prescriptions have been filled. Many doctors had watched the progress of Celebrex in recent years because they had some patients who could not tolerate existing painkillers. Some of these doctors were quick to prescribe the new drug for these patients. Merck & Co. intends to introduce its similar drug, Vioxx, later this year. J&J has licensed a similar drug from Japan Tobacco Inc. and could introduce the new painkiller by late 2002. These new drugs, part of the so-called Cox-2 class, appear less likely to cause ulcers and stomach bleeding because they target an enzyme linked to pain and inflammation without blocking a related enzyme that protects the stomach from its own acid. Older drug appears to hit both enzymes. Celebrex is the first drug to come from the research of Monsanto's drugmaking unit, Searle, since Monsanto acquired the drugmaker in 1985 for about $2.7 billion. --Kerry Dooley in the Princeton newsroom (609) 279-4016 /mfr news.com