Lars39

U.S. Prescription Drug Sales Grow Slowly; Hydrocodone Most Prescribed

We have a pain in our Psyche.

R&D Costs of the Pfizer / Wyeth Deal

Pfizer's R&D center employs 6,000 at the cost of several $Billion a year. The last blockbuster drug Pfizer developed was Viagra, which was not even discovered by the R&D group in Groton, but by accident in England. Lipitor was purchased as part of the Warner Lambert acquisition in 2000. Pfizer could have closed the Research group 10 years ago, saved the money and spent it on buying drug compounds from others. Pfizer's purchase of Pharmacia was of questional value, and I don't see Wyeth being worth $68 Billion. Is it enough to offset the loss of Lipitor patent protection two years out? Doubtful IMO.

Pfizer / Wyeth Deal Will Be Costly No Matter What

This reminds me of Pfizer's purchase of Pharmacia, a very questionable value for the money. Is Wyeth really worth $68 Billion? I don't see it.
Agree that the R&D group as well as top management have not added value to the Corp for years and need to go. Just take a look at a graph of PFE stock price over the last 10 years.

5 Reasons Pfizer Shouldn't Buy Wyeth

Agree. Pfizer's purchase of Pharmacia was a mistake, and PFE has a real problem with their R&D lack of return on the 10s of $Billions spent.
They should shut down the R&D except for M&A activities and concentrate on smaller biotech companies and companies with late stage promising products. WYE is too expensive for the potential ROI.