Stock research we call it. You want to talk about stock research. Let's talk about how Pfizer the world renowned drug company blew itself up over the weekend. We all know that the classes of drugs, known as the STATINS have meant billions to the bottom line of the major pharmaceutical drug companies. Remember we said billions to the bottom line, not just sales. Nothing is more profitable than a blockbuster drug to the bottom line. It's like printing money at the US Treasury, maybe better.

For years Pfizer made billions off of Lipitor, which is a STATIN drug that lowers LDL bad Cholesterol. It works like this. We all eat crap loaded down with the wrong stuff. Let's admit it, we love it. We're overweight as a nation, and we don't like string beans and asparagus. We like pizza, and Big Macs, and don't forget the French fries. By the way, do you know the number one selling vegetable in the world is the potato, because you can make French fries out of them? What's number two you ask? It's the tomato, because you make ketchup out of them and enrich John Kerry's wife, every time you buy a bottle.

If we like to eat this stuff and we do, what happens is that somewhere in your 50's and 60's, you start taking a statin drug like Pfizer's Lipitor to knock down your LDL (BAD) Cholesterol. The LDL brings the bad stuff to the heart. Lipitor acts on the LDL Cholesterol that's manufactured by your body independent of your food supply. Your body manufacturers between 75%, and 80% of the LDL BAD Cholesterol that is in your body. This is why Lipitor is such a miracle drug.

Your body also has HDL GOOD Cholesterol which acts as a vacuum cleaner to remove the LDL BAD Cholesterol from the body. The more HDL good stuff you have, the better off you are. Here's the problem. It's very tough to increase your HDL levels in your body. There's niacin which is really a vitamin. There are certain foods that do it. There's also exercise, and losing weight (sure).

Pfizer put $800 million dollars into developing an HDL enhancing drug called Torcetrapib. They've been at this since 1999. The drug was in late stage clinical trials. They had 15,000 people in the trial which is composed of two groups. One group gets the drug. The second group gets a harmless placebo which looks, and feels just like the real drug. The doctors and researchers administering the trial are clueless as to which group you happen to be in because that could lead to investigator BIAS. You might take better care of the people receiving the real drug as opposed to the so called sugar pill. The trail went on for years as these trials normally do.

Now here's the deal. When you do a clinical trial, there's always an ethics panel supervising the process. These are independent doctors and scientists who are there to make sure everything is kosher for want of a better word. As an example, only the ethics committee knows who's getting the real pills and who's getting the placebos.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next