Trenton, N.J. – Merck & Co. and Schering-Plough Corp., partners looking to grab more of the $32 billion global cholesterol-drug market, will jointly develop a new medicine combining their Zetia with rival Pfizer Inc.’s blockbuster Lipitor.
The planned drug, meant to reduce bad-cholesterol levels in two ways, could hit the market when Lipitor’s patent expires in a few years, Merck and Schering-Plough said Monday. Information on when human testing would begin was not disclosed.
Merck and Schering-Plough have a 7-year-old joint venture that markets two cholesterol drugs: Zetia and a combo pill launched in mid-2004 called Vytorin. It combines Zetia and Zocor, Merck’s former blockbuster, which lost patent protection last June.
Zetia is the only drug on the market that limits absorption of cholesterol in the digestive tract. Zocor, like other drugs in a popular class called statins, limits cholesterol production in the liver.
The Merck-Schering-Plough joint venture promotes Vytorin heavily, stressing that it fights cholesterol in two ways.
“We anticipate that the Lipitor/Zetia combination may be more effective than Vytorin on cholesterol reduction and could capture an even larger share of the cholesterol-management market than Vytorin,” analyst Joseph Tooley of A.G. Edwards wrote in a research note.
