Tales from the pharma front - ideas left for dead - Claritin department
Derek Lowe is a Pharmaceutical Chemist and has wonderful blog called In the Pipeline.
Today's story is about drugs that the companies left for dead that later turn out to be huge successes. Check out
That's Never Gonna Work
A colleague and I were talking the other day about the (long) list of drugs that have been left for dead at some point during their development. There are some famous cases – Lipitor, for example, which wasn’t thought by many at Warner-Lambert to have a business case worth even taking into the clinic. But these things are all over the place.
One that I know about was Claritin (loratadine). Schering-Plough worked on nonsedating antihistamines for a while, without too much success, and the whole program was eventually killed. The head of research at the time stated flatly: “There are no nonsedating antihistamines”. Of course, when the first one (Seldane) came on the market, that made everyone rethink a bit. In the interim, one of the chemists had continued making compounds, despite several (increasingly testy) warnings to stop.
As it turned out, he (Frank Villani) and one of his associates (Charlie Magatti) had made loratadine itself, the nonsedating antihistamine which helped to pay everyone’s salary at Schering-Plough through the 1990s. But by the time that was worked out, Villani himself had been eased out the door (or not eased while on his way out, depending on who you talk to), in good part due to his continued work on the compounds. That head of research, to his credit, actually referred ruefully later on to his own “no nonsedating antihistamines” comment – there are plenty of other people who would have just Never Said Such a Thing At All in that position.
Sheesh -- Jen and I both have allergies and we gobble that stuff down by the handfull. We bought it back when Schering-Plough had the lock on the patents and we now get the Costco generic version.
Good stuff and to think that it might not have seen the light of day.
Derek's blog is well worth checking out every couple of days -- some of the posts are of interest more for pharma industry people but there are a lot of general chemistry and business posts that are a lot of fun to read.
My favorites are his
How Not to Do It. A lot of vicarious fun...
Posted by DaveH at March 24, 2008 8:59 PM
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