Word: merck
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...Steven Abramson, chairman of the FDA advisory panel, was impressed--and not at all surprised that the big drug companies were kicking up a fuss. "The cox-2 inhibitor will make it very difficult for them to compete," he says. Which could explain why Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Glaxo Wellcome are rushing to get their own versions into trial as fast as possible...
Sources: World AIDS Conference (1 and 2); Merck; New England Journal of Medicine
...though, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that's forcing me to reconsider. It turns out that as many as 6 million Americans could reduce still further their already low risk of heart disease by popping lovastatin, a relatively new cholesterol-controlling drug manufactured by Merck. The big question for each of us, of course, is whether we are among the 6 million...
...think I'll pass. After all, there are plenty of ways to reduce my cholesterol without resorting to drugs. You can bet Merck will be doing further studies to see if people like me would be wise to start taking preventive lovastatin. But for now, I think I'll try to run an extra mile or two each week and cut more saturated fat from my diet. A pill may be easier, but I'd just as soon avoid...
Similar or not, no one, except perhaps a few animal-rights activists, is about to chase mice out of the lab. Mice save lives. Because their tumors develop almost overnight, says Merck's Oliff, "we can do tests 10 or 100 times more quickly than in humans." Their usefulness varies with diseases, though. He notes that rodents are better predictors of human reaction to cardiovascular or anti-inflammatory agents than to cancer or diseases of the central nervous system. But that's a trade-off researchers are more than willing to accept in their search for a cancer cure...