Pfizer grabs drug rival for £736m

DRUGS giant Pfizer is paying $1.3bn (£736m) to take over Esperion, a company that produces a drug almost exactly the same as its own anti-cholesterol blockbuster Lipitor.

However, Pfizer is confident it can market both drugs side-by-side.

Esperion's ETC-216 reduces cholesterol, just as Lipitor does. But Pfizer says it will market the Esperion drug as a remedy to be taken in a crisis by heart-attack patients and offer Lipitor as a long-term treatment.

Drug companies admit that half the 10 top-selling drugs in the world offer almost no advantage over products they had marketed previously.

Pharmaceuticals companies have become skilled at selling similar products under different names since GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca pioneered the process with some of the most popular drugs on the market.

GlaxoSmithKline has recently used a similar strategy with Augmentin XR, Wellbutrin XL, Wellbutrin SR and Paxil CR - all minor variations on older drugs, the company acknowledges.

When AstraZeneca's popular Prilosec heartburn drug came off patent the company used an innovative legal strategy to delay generic copies and began selling a nearly identical pill, Nexium, which became the most successful drug introduced in the past two years.