Pfizer Skin Cancer Drug Fails Clinical Test

Wall Street Journal:

Pfizer's search for new drugs took another hit when the company halted a late-stage trial of an experimental medicine to treat metastatic skin cancer.

An interim analysis of the study's results showed that Pfizer's antibody-based drug tremelimumab did no better than conventional chemotherapy in treating patients with advanced melanoma judged to be surgically incurable.

It's a setback for cancer patients and Pfizer. For the company, struggling to improve the productivity of its research, the effect is as much psychological as financial. Pfizer's late-stage pipeline is pretty thin and the company's labs haven't been able to make much of a dent in the problem. Pfizer drugs worth $25 billion in 2007 sales face generic competition by 2012, Dow Jones Newswires notes. Blockbuster Lipitor could go generic as soon as 2010.

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal