According to a report by CNN Money, Zocor had $4.4 billion and Zoloft totaled $3.3 billion in 2005 sales.
As per the trend, the loss of patent will tend to dip both the price and the multi billion dollars sales revenue of the drug by 80 percent over the next year, as the competition opens to a host of generic drugmakers.
However, the original drugmakers often continue to produce the branded drugs even after their drugs goes off patent, because hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales can still be harvested from patients who prefer the brand name.
Also, Big Pharma can continue to make money by introducing spin-offs of their branded drugs such as adding suffixes like XR (as in Wyeth's antidepressant EffexorXR) or XL (as in the Forest Labs' antidepressant WellbutrinXL) to the original name to reflect an improvement.<
As per the reports, analysts believe that since both Merck and Pfizer have had many years to prepare for these patent expirations, the impending loss of sales is already factored into their stocks. So, they don't expect a big dip in the stock price for either Pfizer or Merck.
In their efforts to prepare for patent expiration and to appease investor's interests both the companies have launched multi-billion dollar cost-cutting efforts and have already begun courting biotechs in their effort to boost their new-drug pipelines.
The experts, however, believe that Zocor's patent loss may threaten sales of Pfizer's Lipitor, another cholesterol-cutting drug which could face competition from generic Zocor.
Lipitor is the world's top-selling drug with $12.2 billion in 2005 sales.
Pfizer, and also some analysts, have insisted that Lipitor is not interchangeable with competing products like Zocor.
Pfizer is also looking to make a market space by testing Lipitor, which lowers LDL or "bad" cholesterol, in combination with the experimental drug torcetrapib, which appears to raise HDL, or "good" cholesterol. Experts believe that the combination could add billions of dollars in potential sales, if the tests are successful and the drug is FDA-approved.
