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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."
My ass. you grant a monopoly to someone. That someone gets big on that monopoly. You think that they would just let it go when patent expires ? think again. has music industry let it go with copyrights ? no, they are trying to extend it to 120 years now. pfizer is just another example. bad example though - they could just lobby beforehand and try to extend patent durations, like music industry does with copyrights.
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At least Pfizer isn't trying to unreasonably extend the patent, sue its customers, or use other underhanded tricks to cheat the system at the expense of everyone else.
Unlike some other...companies.
A patent is going to expire. The company responds with marketing and by lowering it's price.
That's just horrid~ Someone is working to hard to find ills.
What's that? there are going to create a generic version of the drug they created? OMG!!1!!!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey, they are just taking care of their stockholders Nothing wrong with it, right?
Capitalism, it just works, bitches.
Today Pfizer announced results of a new study showing that cholesterol has nothing to do with any health problems whatsoever, but water can kill you. Simultaneously they announced the start of trials of a new drug to control this menace, tentatively named hydroprofitor.
Damn public! how dare they want affordable drugs for healthcare!!!!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So, if congress has been able to withstand the lobbying for indefinite patents, given the massive amount of money on the line as indicated by this single drug patent, how come they fold to the likes of Disney when it comes to copyright? Maybe it's the cuteness of the cartoon characters.
Better known as 318230.
They have a huge profit margin because of the stunning breakthrough they funded when they backed Bruce Roth.
Roth first synthesized atorvastatin in 1985. For the discovery, he received the 1997 Warner-Lambert Chairman's Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, the 1999 Inventor of the Year Award from the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, the 2003 American Chemical Society Award for Creative Invention, the 2003 Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Service, the 2005 Iowa State University Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2006 Pfizer Global Research and Development Achievement Award.
Roth was named a 2008 Hero of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Phizer was able to extend the drug by getting new patents on it. Then for these past few months they paid off the generic drug makers to not create generics for the drug. A scheme known as "pay for delay". Heard about it yesterday on Marketplace and was shocked to hear that a generic drug company has to go to court after the patent has expried to official unexpire it. "This is the government policy, set up in the 1980s, to bring us lower drug prices." http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/lipitor-makes-way-generics
Pfizer spends alot on doctors paying them to write scripts for pfizer drugs.
I'm pretty much convinced that Lipitor is a scam, along with the whole "cholesterol" theory. This will just lead to more drug-laden zombies, and more overprescription for perfectly healthy people.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The free market just kicked in. The drug companies are now playing meet or beat. Translation: competition works.
What's wrong with that?
The problem existed PRIOR to the patent expiring, where artificially high prices existed.
Go tinker with that set of rules if you dare, but don' blame the free market just because prices
come down the minute the market actually becomes free.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Pfizer is a for-profit company, and that they want to patent their product and profit from their ingenuity is great. That's how capitalism works: sell a good product that people want to buy, turn a profit, succeed.
However, drug patents last up to 20 years. Rather than riding heavily on Lipitor profits for that period of time, and releasing alternate versions of the same drug over and over again, wouldn't it have been prudent to turn efforts toward producing and patenting the Next Amazing Drug?
They knew the day would come that Lipitor's patent would expire. If, in spite of the massive profits they've made from this and other products, they couldn't innovate anything to replace that massive chunk of profits, then they have to bow out gracefully instead of going through ridiculous, unsavory means to ensure revenue.
Profiting morally from a good profit is capitalism. Tactics like this are not.
Canada has had generic Lipitor for over a year now.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
that the quoted David A. Balto is an anti-trust attorney, and from his statements likely working for a generic drug manufacturer(s). He argued for the ATT/T-Mobile merger, so one can tell he's not particular about which side he argues.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
All of these cholesterol drugs including Lipitor work by mucking about with your liver. I am type 1 diabetic and my doctor prescribed a low dose of Zocor (a similar cholesterol drug). After about a year I started experiencing weird join pain and nerve problems. My first concern was ALS - I knew someone who died of it. I saw doctors, including a neurologist, had lots of tests done . Nothing. It wasn't until a year later that I read an article in the LA times about Zocor being withdrawn from the market at a higher dose because of the same symptom that I realized what was causing them. None of my doctors told me anything.
My cholesterol isn't really that high. My doctors prescribed it because of the diabetes. I stopped taking it and the pain improved dramatically. At one point it was so bad I could barely lift the top off of a coffee can.
The other side is the garbage that we call food. Most of it is loaded with trans-fatty oils and added sugars. Forget all of the claims on the front of the box - get a microscope and read the ingredient list on the back. If there are hydrogenated oils or lots of added sugar (any form of corn syrup, anything with *ose, "designer" sugars such as honey, molasses, evaporated cane juice, etc. Try to find foods that have fewer ingredients that can pronounce you actually might have in your kitchen. They are available and often don't cost much more. Some of the more reliable brands are Kashi, Amy's, Trader Joe's, Edy's, Martins, etc.
If you take any of these drugs, look them up on youtube (don't bother with webmd or anything similar as they are useless). The results might scare you.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
They followed this up by closing down their most productive R& D sites globally.
Vast personal profit for the execs, decades of experienced researchers tossed to the wind, and their "if we screened X million candidates with this robotic platform and got N useful hits, if we screen X^5 million via robotic screen we'll get N^5 final candidates and reap the rewards" strategy didn't work worth a darn. Big surprise.
That's what happens when suits (some hired from companies with a GREAT track record for drug development- like.... McDonalds) take over a scientific company.
A few more rounds of boosting stock price via layoffs and this will be a little has-been of a company.
Nice work there guys. Way to destroy a company. You could have done the same thing by just buying a pizza chain or something and selling off assets for personal gain, and not cost the real human race useful medications.
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).
There's a vaccine to prevent a virus that causes cervical cancer. Unless you are living in a cave you would have heard of it. The development and even the US FDA trials were paid for by the Australian taxpayer, yet in the USA it sells for far more than anywhere else becuase that is what the market will bear. The US drug company that licenced it is not paying any more per dose than anyone else either, that extra money is pure profit. That's just one very blatant example of many.
I suggest you pay more attention before writing "bears only the most tenuous connection to the truth" then following that with something that is incorrect.
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Best selling drug of all time? Never heard of aspirin?
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No, part of me wonders the same thing. There has been research published recently that suggests that the link between serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease may not be as direct as once thought. If the thing that we're measuring does not have a direct correlation to future disease, then the drug we're taking to lower the measurement might not have any real benefit. Statins like Lipitor have probably improved the health of a lot of people, but they may still be overprescribed.
I mean, TFA itself says Lipitor is "the best-selling drug of all time." Really? Would that many people really have died of heart attacks had they not been prescribed this drug?
People talk about how "modern diet, modern society is killing us" -- again, really? You should have seen how my grandfather ate. He'd trim the thick ribbons of fat from the ends of his pork chops so he could eat them last, then he'd eat the fat off everybody else's plate. He lived to a reasonable age, long before statins were ever invented. Sure, that's anecdotal, but where are the statistics? Was heart disease caused by high cholesterol really that much more common among my grandfather's generation? Or my father's? So much more common that it proves that almost everybody ought to be on Lipitor? My gut tells me no. Some studies from England (where my grandfather lived) suggest rates of heart disease did increase through the postwar years, but then started to decline in the 1970s -- again, before statins were even available. One does have to wonder.
Breakfast served all day!
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When your argument spurs hundreds of Slashdotters to defend both patents and big pharma... you lose.
Surely Alcohol is the best selling drug of all time
Lipitor has had an ANDA filed for a generic version by Watson, yes. However, the law allows Pfizer to grant a 180 day exclusivity contract to a manufacturer of their choice (in this case Watson) for the ANDA. To those affected by this drug going generic: IT HAS NOT GONE TRULY GENERIC YET! Wait until the 180 day exclusivity contract expires (in 179 days) and the true "invisible hand" will take effect in the market.
In the meantime, you're most likely going to need to get the BRAND NAME Lipitor for it to be covered to the fullest extent by your pharmacy benefit manager ("insurance company")! These PBMs get rebates (NOT kickbacks) to lower the cost of the brand-name drug, so it's financially advantageous to the member to not cover the generic yet. Here's why:
Lipitor (brand) 90ct bottle = $550 retail, minus $330 in rebates = $220 total cost of drug.
atorvastatin by Watson (generic) 90ct bottle = $530 retail, minus $0 in rebates (Watson doesn't offer any) = $550 total cost of drug.
(These amounts are fictional, however they represent true real-world scenarios.)
Disclaimer: I work for one of the US' largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers in the Clinical Review department. We had a meeting today regarding all of our Medicare Part-D patients and how they're affected by this specific drug going generic. No suits were involved and the members are receiving the best possible drug savings until the exclusivity contract expires. Once it expires the new generics will be placed on the tier-1 ("generic") copay structure.
RE: "Patent Expires On Best Selling Drug of All Time"
There's a patent on alcohol ? Who knew ?
...beats the generics by selling at a generics price, I don't really see what the problem is.
I am Canadian, and I love our health care service. My mother died of cancer. Sadly they were not able to save her, but she received top end treatments in the attempt to save her (Chemotherapy etc). Total cost to her estate: $50 for the ambulance that took her to the hospital just before the end. Despite what many critics of our health care system often say, there was no waiting list, she had no delays in receiving her treatments etc.
Recently, my wife had to go in for eye surgery to straighten her eyes. It wasn't critical surgery, and she did have delays before it took place, but those may have been a natural part of diagnosing the problem. Cost to us: nothing. It was all covered.
These two instances were both covered by the standard health care that everyone receives in Canada. Despite what all the critics say, the system works up here.
I saw someone make a good bullet point about the difference between health care in somewhere like Canada or Britain and the US: Up here we have a health care system. Down in the US you have a healthcare industry :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Yeah, keep bleating "4 legs good, 2 legs bad." You can swallow the bullshit if you want, but the system is coming around to a better understanding of arteriosclerosis, aka atherosclerosis. For example, see Inflammation and atherosclerosis, Inflammation in atherosclerosis, and a lot of other research. Your "high LDL, low HDL" blood content has a correlation with arteriosclerosis, but which is the cause and which the response? Eh?
Pay special attention to findings like:
You are also seeing conventional medicine slowly (much too slowly) come around to an understanding what a wonderful food the egg is, how the phobia about butter and the fad for margarine have not been a good thing, and other truths you would probably label as quackery.
Deposits of cholesterol are the body's response to arterial pathology, not the cause of it.