Merck, Schering Call on Doctors to Boost Vytorin Use (Update1)

By Michelle Fay Cortez and Shannon Pettypiece

March 27 (Bloomberg) — Merck & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. are telling physicians to ignore research showing their jointly marketed cholesterol-drug Vytorin failed to halt progression of artery disease. It’s unlikely they will listen.

Preliminary findings of the study, called Enhance and released in January, drove Vytorin prescriptions down 18 percent and slashed $49 billion from the drugmakers’ market value. In an effort to retain the pill’s $2.8 billion in annual sales, Merck and Schering-Plough are doing the unprecedented: discrediting research they funded and helped design.

The trial, intended to show Vytorin can reduce artery clogging, was created to help the drug compete against Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor for a share of the $35 billion worldwide cholesterol market. The failure of Vytorin to outperform an older drug means doctors have little reason to use it. The final report, to be presented Sunday at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago, won’t help, researchers say.

“The study results aren’t going to influence practice much,” said Randy Thomas, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “The question we’re asking is does it lower heart attack risk. We won’t know that from Enhance.”

Sekar Kathiresan, director of preventive cardiology at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, says research may eventually show that Vytorin and Zetia, one of the two medicines that make up Vytorin, will prevent heart attacks, strokes and death. Until studies prove that, he plans to rely on older so- called statins like Lipitor and simvastatin, a generic version of Merck’s Zocor, the other component in Vytorin

Again, statements like these show that big Pharma does not care as long as they make the bucks!