[Mitch]

Pfizer has lost 38billion market value after it recently announced that it's Celebrex drug has increased heart ailments in a recent study. Celebrex is in the same class of drug as merck's Vioxx, cox-2 inhibitors. The announcements have slammed pharmaceutical stocks today which have already been depressed from the earlier announcement from Merck several months ago. News story is here: here

[Donaldson Tan]

depressing news.. read it in TCE..

[movies]

Dern it, my career outlook is getting worse every day.  I may have to suck it up and try to be a professor!

[Mitch]

It's really good news if you know how to play the market. Unlike Merck, Pfizer has a very successful drug line, so Pfizer still remains a very profitable company. Also, since Pfizer let the news slip in mid december, it means investors can sell their stock at a loss at the end of the year to garner a tax loss. This means that the stock will most likely be cheapest in January after the flaky investors pull out.

Since Pfizer makes up a huge percentage of pharmaceutical mutual funds and indexes, this makes financial institutions sell these stocks and depress (I think unfairly) the stock price of other drug companies that don't even have cox-2 inhibitors in their drug line. This makes the other drug companies look more attractive and we should see their stock price increse shortly.

[movies]

Pfizer is up again.  I guess some studies in Alzheimer's patients eased some of the fears about Celebrex.  I'm not clear on the details though.

[jdurg]

Well I knew that Pfizer stock would rise as soon as I started working there.      Seriously though, it's amazing how much research goes into every single drug that comes out of a pharmaceutical company.  While I really cannot go into far too much detail about what I do because of NDA's, I can state that it takes quite a long time for a drug to be developed and quite a bit of money goes into the research.  Before a drug even hits the market, it has already undergone years and years of trials and studies.  Pfizer understands that the amount of money spent on the development is far less than the possible amount that they could lose by distributing a lethal drug.  The more I work for the company the more I really appreciate what they do.