Drug’s affected by Pfizer’s portfolio prioritization
As you have likely already read, Pfizer has recently prioritized its portfolio and will nix discovery and early clinical development for drugs in several disease areas, including dyslipidemia/atherosclerosis, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, and obesity independent of diabetes.
You might be wondering why the world’s largest pharmaceutical company is abandoning treatments for some of the West’s most common chronic medical problems. I wasn’t privy to Pfizer’s strategy sessions, but I can surmise that the portfolio prioritization effort–like all such efforts if done properly–considered the technical, regulatory and market risks of the indications and the specific drugs in the pipe, the corporate experience (intrinsic capabilities) in each area, the cost and time of development, the time available to each drug for exclusivity, and the competitive landscape.
Given the size of the pipeline and number of people with skin in the game, I can imagine that the process was a long and painful one. But the outcomes for some therapeutic categories were likely faits accomplis, driven by recent Pfizer experience. Consider Pfizer’s tremendously expensive disappointments with drugs like torcetrapib (abandoned) and lasofoxifene (delayed). All else being equal, people will tend to avoid loss over acquiring gains; an insight known as loss (risk) aversion, first demonstrated by the behavioral-economics dynamic duo of Tversky and Kahneman. Other cognitive biases, such as the recency effect , which magnifies the risk of similar future events when faced with recent catastrophe, and omission bias, which tends to cause a more favorable view of harmful omissions (e.g. not pursuing certain drugs) compared with harmful actions (e.g. a failed drug program), will tend to support risk-averse decisions.
Now that the decisions are cast in stone, which drugs in development will be immediately impacted? What might be up for sale? Here’s a list of NMEs:
Atherosclerosis/dyslipidemia:
- PF-3185043 (Ph 1) - CETP inhibitor
- CP-800569 (Ph 1) - CETP inhibitor
Obesity:
- PF-2575799 (Ph 1): Presumably one of these two Phase 1 Pfizer-encoded NMEs is Noxxon’s Nox-B11, a ghrelin antagonist
- PF-3932295 (Ph 1)
- CE-326597 (Ph 2)
Osteoarthritis:
- SD-6010 (Ph 2/3): iNOS inhibitor
Osteoporosis/bone healing:
- CP-533536 (Ph 2): EP2-selective PGE2 agonist
GI diseases:
- PF-4548043 (Ph 1): presumably one of these two Phase 1 Pfizer-encoded drugs is the motilin receptor agonist licensed from Kos (KOS-2187)
- PF-2391677 (Ph 1)
- PF-885706 (Ph 2)
