Pfizer Inc. touted progress in its experimental drug pipeline in a periodic update Thursday, but also saw research setbacks for two bright hopes.
The New York drug maker has recently been focusing on disease areas that are underserved or where it thinks it can dominate the competition, such as cancer and Alzheimer's. Pfizer has been weeding out drugs that don't fit into that strategy, like a medicine similar to its fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica that it scrapped in February, after determining that it wouldn't have brought much addited value to payers or patients.
As a result, Pfizer's drug pipeline shrunk to 100 compounds from 114 in September, while its late-stage, or Phase III, pipeline, has stayed static at 25 medicines in testing. Since its last pipeline update for investors in September, 21 drug-development programs have progressed to the next phase of human testing, while 26 have been discontinued.
Briggs Morrison, Pfizer's senior vice president for development, said the company is meeting the goals it outlined to investors in March 2008, including starting as many as 12 Phase III research programs by now. Pfizer also said it would file applications for as many as 20 new drugs or new uses for existing drugs between 2010 and 2012.
Catherine Arnold at Credit Suisse says Pfizer is pruning its pipeline to smooth its integration with Wyeth, which Pfizer agreed to acquire in January in a deal now valued at about $62 billion and expected to close in the third quarter. "It's now about taking a hard look at what's there and not pushing things forward that cost a lot of money just to have them on a poster," she says.
One of Pfizer's pipeline hopefuls is an experimental pill for rheumatoid arthritis known as a JAK inhibitor, which Pfizer said it moved into late-stage testing in February. Other new additions to Pfizer's late-stage pipeline are a promising Alzheimer's treatment called Dimebon, a pain medicine Tanezumab and a medicine for a rare skin-thickening condition called Xiaflex.
Among the discontinued programs is a once-hyped medicine for obesity that Pfizer has decided to terminate after a similar medicine sold by Sanofi-Aventis SA has run into safety concerns.
Separately, Pfizer said on Thursday that it would halt a breast-cancer study of its top-selling cancer drug Sutent, after patients showed no improvement in a clinical trial versus a chemotherapy drug called capecitabine. Pfizer said it was continuing to study Sutent in breast cancer despite this setback, because its other trials test Sutent in combination with existing therapies.
The trial was a rare disappointment for Sutent, which had sales of $847 million last year as a treatment for kidney and a gastrointestinal cancer. Pfizer currently is testing Sutent in five other Phase III cancer programs, including lung and colorectal cancer; these additional indications for Sutent are one-fifth of Pfizer's late-stage pipeline. Last month, results were so positive in testing against a type of prostate cancer that Pfizer shut down a trial early.‹
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