For patients and Big Pharma alike, the prescription pill business is going to get ugly.
The last big shift in the sleeping-pill market came 12 years ago, when Ambien hit pharmacy shelves in the U.S. The drug is viewed as having fewer side effects than older sleep aids such as Halcion, which left patients feeling groggy in the morning.
Sutent, a targeted cancer pill, could become a big drug if ongoing studies in breast cancer prove effective.
One big hope is Zetia, a cholesterol pill that would be added onto other cholesterol-lowering medicines to make them stronger.
AstraZeneca, like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, has made a big effort to break into the cancer pill business, where very expensive treatments have become the norm.
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Other cardiologists argue the combo pill won't have a big impact because the vast majority of patients do fine with statins alone.
That law created the modern generic drug industry by inventing a system in which generic drug companies get six-month monopolies on a copycat pill if they can overturn one of Big Pharma's patents.
We had to stabilize the financial system, which, given the role of the big banks in creating this mess, was a pretty tough pill to swallow.
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Caduet will also provide another big benefit for patients with health insurance: Because it is a single pill, patients will get both drugs for a single co-payment, making it inexpensive for them even after Norvasc becomes a cheap generic.
The last experimental drug to generate sales forecasts as big as the ones analysts are ballparking for bapineuzumab was torcetrapib, a Pfizer pill designed to reduce heart attacks.
The drug firm may have gotten a big boost from a stalled study for PTK-787, an Avastin-like pill being developed by Novartis (nyse: NVS - news - people ).
To help make this pill palatable to working-class investors, fund families often stress at some point there will be no big, one-time front-end load, such as the 5.75% sales charge for traditional Class A fund shares.
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