Trenton, N.J. • Lipitor, the best-selling drug in the history of pharmaceuticals, is the blockbuster that almost wasn’t.
When it was in development, the cholesterol-lowering medicine was viewed as such an also-ran it almost didn’t make it into patient testing.
By the time Lipitor went on sale in early 1997, it was the fifth drug in a class called statins that lower LDL or bad cholesterol. The class already included three blockbusters, drugs with sales of $1 billion a year or more. Normally, that would make it very tough for a latecomer to sway many doctors and patients to switch.
But a 1996 study showed Lipitor reduced bad cholesterol dramatically more than the other statins, from the very start of treatment and even more so over time. A striking graph of those results helped Lipitor sales representatives turn it into the world’s best-selling drug ever, with more than $125 billion in sales over 14½ years.
Nicknamed "turbostatin," Lipitor became the top-selling statin barely three years after it was launched. It’s provided 20 percent to 25 percent of Pfizer Inc.’s annual revenue for years.
But after nearly a decade as the top-selling drug, Lipitor is set to be toppled in 2012 after getting its first generic rivals four weeks ago.
It’s a run not likely to be repeated.
Back in the early 1980s, the public was just starting to learn what cholesterol was. There was little evidence that controlling it with medication could be so crucial in preventing disability and early death, and the coming epidemic of obesity and diabetes in an aging population wasn’t foreseen.
At the time, heart attack prevention basically amounted to telling patients to eat more oatmeal and skip the steak.
Lipitor creator Warner-Lambert, a midsize drugmaker best known for consumer health products, including Listerine, Benadryl allergy pills and Halls cough drops, got a late start in what turned into a surprisingly fast-growing market.
-
Corey Hodges: Door to door isn’t best way to preach to Mormons and others, but it is one way
Published Jun 19, 2013 01:45:28PM -
Dow falls as Fed suggests it’s closer to slowing bond purchases
Published Jun 19, 2013 01:34:03PM -
Prep boys’ soccer: Most Valuable Players
Published Jun 19, 2013 01:21:56PM -
Becker vetoes City Council’s $8 million tax hike
Published Jun 19, 2013 01:12:02PM
Merck & Co. had a decade lead with Mevacor, launched in 1987. By 1994, its successor drug, Zocor, along with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Pravachol and Novartis AG’s Lescol, had crowded the market.
"Those other companies didn’t even take us seriously. They didn’t think we could be a viable contender," said Adele Gulfo, then head of cardiovascular marketing at Warner-Lambert Co. who now heads Pfizer’s primary-care drugs business.
Doctors said they were "quite satisfied with the medicines we have," she recalled recently.
Given that, marketing executives at Warner-Lambert were projecting Lipitor sales of $300 million a year at best, recalls the drugs’s inventor, chemist Bruce Roth.
"I wish someday you guys could make us a drug we could sell," the marketers told his team, recalls Roth, a research vice president for Genentech, a biotech pioneer now owned by Swiss drugmaker Roche.
They had, but didn’t see it.
"There was a lot of controversy at Warner-Lambert as to whether we should even take our molecule into the clinic" for human testing, Roth says. "It was kind of a big risk. ... It’s millions of dollars."
But senior management was persuaded in 1990 to at least fund the initial round of testing on a couple of dozen employee volunteers.
The results were far better than what had been seen in the animal tests.
"It tremendously, incredibly outperformed the other statins," Roth says. "It was as good at its lowest dose as the other statins were at their highest dose."
So Warner-Lambert partnered with much-larger Pfizer Inc., considered the industry’s top marketer, first to help fund the expensive late-stage testing of the drug in people and then to promote Lipitor after it was launched. Pfizer bought out Warner-Lambert in 2000 to block two other companies trying to acquire it and get control of Lipitor.
Next Page >Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
