Against odds, Lipitor became world's top seller
Lipitor, the best-selling drug in the history of pharmaceuticals, is the blockbuster that almost wasn't. When it was in development, the cholesterollowering medicine was viewed as such an also-ran it almost didn't make it into patient testing.
By the time Lipitor went on sale in early 1997, it was the fifth drug in a class called statins that lower LDL or bad cholesterol. The class already included three blockbusters, drugs with sales of $1 billion a year or more. Normally, that would make it very tough for a latecomer to sway many doctors and patients to switch.
But a 1996 study showed Lipitor reduced bad cholesterol dramatically more than the other statins, from the very start of treatment and even more so over time. A striking graph of those results helped Lipitor sales representatives turn it into the world's best-selling drug ever, with more than $125 billion in sales over 14 1/2 years.
Nicknamed "turbostatin," Lipitor became the top-selling statin barely three years after it was launched. It's provided 20 percent to 25 percent of Pfizer Inc.'s annual revenue for years. But after nearly a decade as the topselling drug, Lipitor is set to be toppled in 2012 after getting its first generic rivals four weeks ago.
It's a run not likely to be repeated. Back in the early 1980s, the public was just starting to learn what cholesterol was. There was little evidence that controlling it with medication could be so crucial in preventing dis- ability and early death, and the coming epidemic of obesity and diabetes in an aging population wasn't foreseen.
At the time, heart attack prevention basically amounted to telling patients to eat more oatmeal and skip the steak. Lipitor creator WarnerLambert, a midsized drugmaker best known for consumer health products including Listerine, Benadryl allergy pills and Halls cough drops, got a late start in what turned into a surprisingly fast-growing market.
Merck & Co. had a decade lead with Mevacor, launched in 1987. By 1994, its successor drug, Zocor, along with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s Pravachol and Novartis AG's Lescol, had crowded the market. "Those other companies didn't even take us seriously. They didn't think we could be a viable contender," said Adele Gulfo, then head of cardiovascular marketing at Warner-Lambert Co. who now heads Pfizer's primary care drugs business. Doctors said they were "quite satisfied with the medicines we have," she recalled recently.