Inspra is an improved version of spironolactone, which is available as a cheap generic.
Before the merger in 2002, analysts had been forecasting that Inspra could become a billion-dollar pill.
The study showed Inspra may reduce the number of deaths occurring in heart failure patients by one-sixth.
Moreover, Inspra may also prove useful in treating heart failure, further increasing the size of its market.
That problem was raised in The New England Journal of Medicine when positive Inspra data were published.
In big clinical trials, both spironolactone and Inspra were shown to improve the survival of heart failure patients.
Inspra may even be one of the drugs that got New York City-based Pfizer interested in buying Pharmacia in the first place.
Pharmacia and DeCode will run clinical trials to see if people with these markers benefit from being put on Inspra or other cardiac drugs being developed by Pharmacia.
But spironolactone, unlike Inspra, can cause impotence and breast tenderness.
But an editorial in the New England Journal said that Inspra might be too expensive to use in patients who had not already tried spironolactone, a cheap generic drug.
Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) recently started selling a drug called Inspra, which reduces the risk of death 15% in heart failure patients.
But even as the New England Journal of Medicine, the arbiter of medical debates, published the results, it also printed an editorial suggesting that Inspra may not be cost effective.
Genetic tests may eventually further boost Inspra's market share.
Inspra, also known as eplerenone, reduces deaths in heart failure patients by 15% compared to placebo, according to the Pharmacia-funded study of 6, 200 patients conducted by Bertram Pitt , a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, and colleagues.
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