Fix It, Fred

摘要

Until a few weeks ago fred Hassan was God's gift to the pharmaceutical industry. In his career he'd made a decades-old drug invulnerable to generic rivals, made Pharmacia so desirable Pfizer had to buy it and had turned Schering-Plough from a cash-hemorrhaging criminal into a jewel of a stock. Then he botched the handling of a study of his most important product, the Schering-invented cholesterol drug Zetia that is also the basis for the combo pill Vytorin. The two generate $5 billion a year (profits are split 50-50 with Merck) and are prescribed 100,000 times a day. Until recently Merck and Schering were saying the franchise would add $1 billion in sales this year and $1 billion next. Not likely.