He has tried Flonase and over-the-counter medicines like Claritin to little or no avail.
But seeing over-the-counter Claritin is only making Wellpoint more eager to trim drug costs.
As hay fever medicines are scuttled by generic Claritin, Merck begins advertising a new allergy pill.
Even without a push to consumers, doctors might have flocked to write prescriptions for Claritin.
The immediate drain on Schering's earnings will be the disappearance of Claritin as a best-selling drug.
The company may be left only with the marketing muscle that made Claritin ubiquitous.
It is possible that taking desloratadine will numb allergic reactions even better than taking Claritin.
The compound, called desloratadine, is what Claritin is made into after it enters the body.
The FDA will consider the move to sell Claritin over the counter on Nov. 28.
Consumers can now buy Claritin and Zyrtec to deal with their allergies or Prilosec to tackle heartburn.
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Expect advertisements for this new allergy drug to be as ubiquitous as those for its predecessor, Claritin.
Generic competition for its allergy drug Claritin is likely to push 2003 earnings down 37% from 2001.
To make up for the loss of Claritin, Schering needs new drugs that can deliver strong growth.
To try and hold on to Claritin sales, Kogan bought a next-generation version of Claritin called Clarinex.
Both of those drugs--Prozac and Claritin, respectively--now bring in less than one-tenth of the revenue they once garnered.
Now, Schering says it doesn't know how much of the prescription Claritin shipped to wholesalers will be sold.
The central issue is simple: how much time does Schering need to switch current Claritin users to Clarinex?
"This is not like the old situation where we were running on one large Claritin product, " says Hassan.
When the generics come, sales vanish--and even a brand like Claritin or Prilosec loses much of its value.
It's even possible that, like Claritin, it wouldn't cause drowsiness--although extensive study would be necessary to find that out.
Seiden and Hazlett agree that if they can get the product out, they can get Claritin users to switch.
If the generics come out then and Clarinex doesn't however, its drug will have trouble capturing Claritin's market share.
Claritin, thanks to years of great advertising and a pretty benign side effect profile, has always been the best-seller.
Claritin provides 24-hour relief for allergy sufferers with almost no serious side effects.
Despite Claritin's success, the seeds of Kogan's eventual defeat may have been sown.
Those qualities, which helped him build Claritin into the world's best-selling allergy pill, may now be getting Schering into trouble.
And they threaten its ability to maintain the Claritin antihistamine franchise, which accounted for one-third of Schering's revenues last year.
But in order to get patients to switch from Claritin to Clarinex, he had to get Clarinex on the market.
But if they suffer from mere hay fever, they'll have to try and fail both Claritin and nasal sprays like Flonase.
The Wyeth move could be bad news not only for over-the-counter Claritin, but also for Clarinex, Schering's current prescription allergy pill.
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