Pfizer Confirms The Switch To Cancer!

This week's Business Week  magazine confirms one companies abandonment of antibiotics and it's new interest in cancer drugs.  You can read the rest in the issue for March 12-18, 2019 online.

  Pfizer’s (PFE) research campus in Sandwich, England, is the birthplace of Viagra, the $2 billion-a-year erectile dysfunction pill that’s among the most famous and widely used drugs in the world. Nonetheless, the 213-acre site, once Pfizer’s biggest European lab, is for sale, and more than 2,000 of the employees who worked there were fired in 2011. Chief Executive Officer Ian Read says he can’t be sentimental. The Sandwich closure, announced in February 2011, two months after he became CEO, is part of his strategy to narrow Pfizer’s focus to just five therapeutic areas. “It was a very difficult decision for us,” says Read. But Sandwich’s scientists did research on allergies and respiratory diseases, “areas where we were less productive and less likely to win in the marketplace.”

Read is betting his less-is-more strategy will yield better returns. So research programs in gene therapy and respiratory disease are gone. Pfizer’s animal health and infant nutrition businesses are being divested. And overlap from the $64 billion acquisition of Wyeth in 2009 is being cut. When Read is done transforming the world’s largest drugmaker, with 2011 sales of $67.4 billion, it will focus on cardiovascular diseases; cancer; neuroscience; vaccines; and inflammation and immunology.