Word: zocor
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...enough for Merck shareholders that the firm's top drugs, Zocor and Fosamax, are going off patent over the next three years and that the pipeline looks thin. Now investors may have to stomach another bitter pill. A Texas jury last week awarded $253.5 million to the widow of a man who died after taking the painkiller Vioxx. In the first verdict reached in more than 4,000 liability cases involving the drug--which Merck recalled last year after studies indicated a possible link to heart failure--the award cast doubt on Merck's strategy of fighting each case individually...
...stock promptly lost $28 billion of its market value, temporarily dragging the Dow Jones industrial average down with it. The timing could not have been worse for Merck, whose sales last year grew a paltry 5%, compared with 23% in 2000, and whose big anticholesterol drug Zocor will lose patent protection in 2006, with nothing to replace it. Some analysts wondered whether the company was ripe for a merger--an idea Merck executives have steadfastly rejected. "Without a deal, Merck cannot grow," says Richard Evans, a senior analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "In fact it may get smaller...
...trial of the cholesterol-lowering statin drug Lipitor last March found that high doses lowered patients' levels of LDL (the "bad" cholesterol) and also reduced their heart-attack risk. That's why the results of a new study on similarly high doses of the statin Zocor are so disappointing. In the 4,500patient study, published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association, patients taking high doses of Zocor fared no better than a low-dose group in terms of heart-attack risk, despite low LDL levels. Why? Perhaps because Lipitor works not just by lowering cholesterol but also...
...Champions. U.K. Becomes A Statin Island I n the fight against heart disease, drugmakers last week hailed a British government decision to green-light over-the-counter-sales of the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins, the first such approval in the world. Starting in July, Zocor - made by U.S. pharmaceutical firm Merck, but marketed in Britain by Johnson & Johnson - will be available without prescription. A health boon? Perhaps, but with statins the most widely prescribed drugs in the U.K. - draining $1.2 billion from the National Health Service each year - the measure appears "motivated more by cost than clinical reasons...
...potential Ireland. Lured by tax breaks and other incentives, American drug giants like Merck are investing heavily in the Southeast Asian country. According to the Singapore Economic Development Board, Merck has invested more than $500 million to build two plants, which will produce the cholesterol drugs Ezetrol and Zocor...