Fat-busters battle for £12bn prize

THE statistics are stunning. One US survey suggests there are 130m overweight people in America alone. And an authoritative British research study estimates that 36m people worldwide should have medication to lower their cholesterol levels.

At the moment, 10m of them pop a fat-busting pill each day in the hope of saving themselves from a heart attack. This is big business, but it has the potential to become even bigger. In fact, the market for cholesterol-lowering drugs is estimated to be worth £12.1bn annually and it is growing at 20% a year.

With the stakes and potential profits so high, it is not surprising that the City has become over-excited by the latest outbreak of the so-called ' cholesterol wars'. News that AstraZeneca, the Anglo-Swedish drugs giant, has developed a pill, Crestor, which is alleged to be 8% better than the present best-selling cholesterol-lowering drug, has been greeted with more jubilation than the discovery of a major oilfield.

On Tuesday, the day after the unveiling of the results of a trial of Crestor's effectiveness, AstraZeneca shares jumped 66p to 1888p. And all this came even before it is possible for the public to get hold of Crestor - the pill is unlikely to be given the go-ahead by regulators in the US and Europe until the middle of next year at the earliest.

Meanwhile, US drugs giant Pfizer is enjoying booming sales with the world's number one cholesterollowering drug, Lipitor. This pill alone earns Pfizer £4.6bn year. Analysts reckon that if Crestor is as good as AstraZeneca claims, it could generate £3.3bn a year. But there are worries for the company.

Though most experts reckon it will gain approval in the end, failure would mean that millions spent on research would have gone down the drain. Profit levels, too, could be whittled away by possible restrictions on dosages.

The stakes are very high indeed for AstraZeneca, which was once considered the drugs company with the best batch of potential blockbuster drugs in the pipeline. Last month, its share price was rocked and it was being talked of as a potential takeover target after it revealed that Crestor would be delayed by at least a year by regulators and that Iressa, hailed as a cancer wonderdrug, did not actually increase the chances of surviving lung cancer.

The double dose of bad news could not have come at a worse time for AstraZeneca which is in the New York courts fighting a case involving its bestselling ulcer drug, Prilosec. If the company loses the case, over patent protection, it could be a hammer blow to its survival chances.

Meanwhile, industry watchers have become increasingly sensitive to bad news on these types of pills. Bayer was forced to withdraw its cholesterol-lowering drug, Baycol, this year after it was suggested that it was connected to 31 deaths in the US.

But no one should underestimate the commercial potential of fat-busters, which reduce cholesterol by blocking a liver enzyme key to its production. The medical journal The Lancet recently reported that a study of 20,000 patients in Britain found that cholesterol-lowering drugs were even better at preventing strokes and heart attacks than had been thought.

To the delight of the drugs industry, the study estimated that at least 36m people could benefit, compared with the 10m taking them now. One analyst said: 'That study alone may have transformed the industry.'