Bad drug news day - July 22, 2008
Woes abound for Merck and Schering-Plough. The pharma companies shares have nose-dived (WSJ) after a report into the combination cholesterol drug Vytorin that they co-own. The report shows that while Vytorin reduced lipid levels, it didn’t help patients with heart-valve disease – which was being targeted in this particular trial.
Worse than that the drug seemed to cause an increase in the risk of cancer, although the companies are denying any link there, saying that if Vytorin were somehow triggering cancer, ‘new cases would first become more common after several years and would be concentrated on one type of cancer, rather than many’ (from Yahoo news/AP) .
The latest news adds to the pile of bad Vytorin news. Another larger trial, results released in January (Time report here) showed that the drug didn’t really have any effect on the thickness of artery-clogging plaques, although it did lower LDL cholesterol. That trial compared the ezetimibe/simvastatin combination drug, Vytorin, with a single therapy simvastatin drug.
There’s a bit of movement in the blogosphere, some anti and some pro-ish Schering/Merck blogs wading in (and trying not to enter into a fight of words in the process). The debate is long and wide-ranging, starting with gossip about why the two companies held back on announcing their second quarter earnings until after the results came out to some pretty straight talking.
The news is not good for the two companies involved, for sure. Their share prices dropped quite sharply as the results of the latest trial were announced, although this seems to be changing now (Reuters). As for the drug, there are some ongoing trials, so we will have to wait and see what happens.
