Pfizer Drops Trials on Heart Drug

End of research on cholesterol medicine torcetrapib is a big blow for firm Pfizer announced Saturday night that it had discontinued research on its most important experimental drug, a treatment for heart disease. The decision is a stunning development that will seriously damage the prospects of the world’s biggest drug company through the next decades.

For people with heart disease, Pfizer’s decision to stop the trial represents the failure of a drug that many cardiologists had viewed as a potentially major advance in efforts to reduce heart attacks and strokes.

The drug, torcetrapib, is designed to raise levels of so-called good cholesterol. It was to be used in combination with older drugs called statins, like Lipitor and Zocor, which reduce so-called bad cholesterol.

In a news release issued Saturday evening, the company said that it would immediately halt clinical trials of the drug and end its development.

The decision was based on interim results from a 15,000-patient clinical trial that found that patients taking torcetrapib in combination with Lipitor were more likely to die or have heart problems than those taking Lipitor alone.

The trial was not scheduled to be completed until 2009. Pfizer had hoped it would prove that the combination of the two drugs was significantly more likely to reduce heart attacks and strokes than Lipitor alone does.

Even before Saturday’s announcement, some cardiologists had raised concerns about torcetrapib, noting that the drug raised blood pressure in many patients, a serious side-effect for a heart medicine. But Pfizer said those concerns would prove to be unfounded, arguing that torcetrapib’s effects on good cholesterol would overwhelm its negative impact on blood pressure.
At this point, it is unclear whether the drug’s failure was due to a specific problem with its chemistry or whether other drugs to raise good cholesterol will also face unexpected problems in clinical trials.

For Pfizer, the end of the program is an enormous blow. Drugs for heart disease are among the most widely used prescription medicines, and Lipitor, also a Pfizer drug, is the best-selling drug in the world, with sales of $13 billion this year.

The company and investors had expected that torcetrapib would be another big seller, making up for sales that Pfizer would lose when Lipitor loses patent protection in the United States in 2010.

Along with that announcement, Pfizer is also cutting some 2,200 sales jobs, reducing the size of its marketing army by a fifth and signaling a sea of change for the way that drug firms market medicines.

In a press release, the drug giant said that the cuts were an "initial step" in its "transformation strategy." Jeffrey Kindler, who took over as Pfizer’s chief executive in July, has promised an across-the-board analysis of the drug firm with no sacred cows.

Through a prepared statement, Kindler said that the changes would "better align our sales organization to our overall customer and business needs." He said the changes would make Pfizer "a more agile and effective company."

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