Word: antacids
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...usually starts an hour after I eat: a burning sensation that hovers somewhere behind my breastbone. If I have an antacid on hand, the burning subsides. If not, it builds until I'm in fiery agony. I still remember one awful night 25 years ago, when I ate a greasy lump of fried dough on a train in Yugoslavia. It felt as though I had swallowed a vial of hydrochloric acid. Actually, that's not too far from the truth. The stomach is essentially a bag filled with powerful acid. If it weren't for a lining of protective cells...
...approved a pair of drugs to HELP CURE ULCERS, not just treat symptoms. An antibiotic taken with an antacid kills off the bacteria implicated in causing most ulcers...
...outside, it varied from a regular horse only in its size and in the fact that it occasionally said, "Clear that with my accountant." Its inside, though, where machine tools and Learjets depreciated in a gooey vat of oil-depletion allowances, looked like the stomach in an antacid commercial...
...Johnson & Johnson/Merck, producer of Pepcid, beat SmithKline to the punch. It won FDA approval of its over-the-counter version, Pepcid AC, and began marketing it in June. Between its introduction and August, when Tagamet HB first appeared in pharmacies, Pepcid AC gained a 22% share of the entire antacid market. "Pepcid had a window of opportunity, and it exploited it well in the marketplace," says Silvermine Consulting's Kelly. "That's an amazing accomplishment." Amazing, and expensive. J&J/Merck and SmithKline are each spending some $100 million in marketing campaigns for their new acid blockers...
...firms in the fray or about to enter it are only too aware that their new heartburn drugs are bound to cannibalize their traditional antacid products. In touting Tagamet HB, for example, SmithKline has to avoid invidious comparisons with Tums, its antacid moneymaker, while J&J/Merck must tiptoe around any comparisons between Pepcid AC and its antacid, the much advertised Mylanta. Meanwhile, Switzerland's Ciba-Geigy has other worries. Though it has no acid blocker available that could bite into sales of Maalox, its bread-and-butter antacid, its competitors' new drugs almost certainly will...