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Patent Expires On Best Selling Drug of All Time
Hugh Pickens writes "The U.S. patent has just expired on Lipitor, the best-selling drug of all time, as the first generic versions go on sale, marking the end of a brand that has dominated the drug industry, lowered the cholesterol of tens of millions of patients, and generated $10.7 billion last year in annual sales. But drug manufacturer Pfizer, dependent on Lipitor for almost one-fifth of the company's revenue, does not intend to go down without a fight. Pfizer is employing unprecedented tactics to hold onto as many Lipitor prescriptions as it can with an aggressive marketing plan and forging deals with insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and patients to meet or beat the price of its generic replacements because even at the lower price, Pfizer has a huge profit margin because of the relatively low cost of materials for Lipitor. Some deals require pharmacies to reject prescriptions for low-cost generics and substitute a discounted name-brand Lipitor while other deals block generic makers from mail-order services that account for an estimated 40 percent of all Lipitor prescriptions. 'Pfizer's tactic of dressing up as a generics company is pulling the rug under the incentive system created to foster the development of generic drugs,' says attorney David A. Balto."
This bears only the most tenuous connection to the truth. Yes, the cholesterol synthesis pathway came out of a lot of university research. HMG-CoA reductase is a critical enzyme. There are a lot of compounds that will inhibit enzymes in vitro; the vast majority are utterly unsuited to use as anything but research compounds because they aren't safe, can't be made into an orally bioavailable form, have bad kinetics, or any of a thousand other things that can sink a potential drug.
Drugs come from... drug companies, not from universities, because drug companies have the billions of dollars to put a compound through clinical trials and the expertise to make the drugs usable.
If they want to outbid generics on price, nothing's wrong with that. But those agreements mentioned in TFS, where pharmacies must only prescribe their offering - that sounds rather anti-competitive to me.
Nope. Drug targets come out of universities. But drug targets are a dime a dozen. The real expense is in clinical trials, and that is paid by drug companies in almost all cases. When the cost is shared the university gets part of the patent.
- Pennsylvania, for instance.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Pfizer did not discover or invent Lipitor. Lipitor was discovered and invented by Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in an industrial setting, not academic. Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis partnered with Pfizer to develop and market the drug and share the profits. From the profits of Lipitor alone, Pfizer was able to buy and takeover Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis, where it closed the Ann Arbor site a few years later in 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02krhNFfEq4). Of the 2200 scientists at the Ann Arbor site, approximately 600 remained with the company, of which approximately 300 relocated to Groton, CT, Pfizer's legacy discovery research site. The other 300 scientists relocated to sites in St. Louis, MO (winding down and eventually closing), La Jolla, CA, and Sandwich, England (now in the process of closing - over 2000 jobs lost). In these relocations, Pfizer was very generous and bought families homes for the original price and paid to relocate employees and their families across the world. Pharmaceutical site closures are very expensive and impact families and disrupt local economies significantly; purchasing employees homes is an incentive to retain talent. Pfizer assisted employees buy new homes by paying for real estate agents and paying closing costs on homes. In 2009, Pfizer bought Wyeth Laboratories and laid-off tens-of-thousands of scientists, many of them from Ann Arbor, MI, its most successful discovery research site ever based on the site talent, technology, and number of marketed drugs from that site, Groton, CT, and many from Wyeth various sites in the U.S. Several years ago, Pfizer was able to reduce the cost of manufacture of Lipitor more than 200-fold using a series of natural wildtype and industrially modified enzymes.
Pfizer's former CEO Jeffrey B. Kindler and former CEO of McDonalds, became so unpopular with the rank-and-file that he earned two nick-names, first "McBurger," and finally and more commonly known as "CLOWN SHOES" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clgRId8x0ZM). Employees would and still post about dissatisfaction with the company's direction and leadership on BioFind.com (http://biofind.com/rumor).