Marketing: April 2008 Archives

Mike Huckman at Pharma's Market recently highlighted Pfizer's new, sober-looking DTC print campaign for Lipitor (atorvastatin), which may be taking advantage of Schering-Plough's recent woes with Vytorin (ezetimibe/simvastatin) and the exhaustively covered* ENHANCE study.

The print ad reads, "Unlike Vytorin and Zetia, Lipitor is FDA approved to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, and certain kinds of heart surgery in patients with several common risk factors for heart disease."

The head-slapping irony here is that Lipitor, when first FDA approved in 1996, was indicated to reduce LDL cholesterol but had not been shown to prevent clinical vascular events like its 4 existing competitors at the time. Nevertheless, Lipitor quickly became the number-one statin (and an uber-blockbuster) because 1) it reduced LDL cholesterol by a relatively greater percentage than the other statins and 2) clinicians believe (or at least believed) that the LDL cholesterol level is directly related to the risk of vascular events. Lipitor wasn't approved to reduce the risk of vascular events until 2004.

*But not entirely accurately covered.