Sometimes it's hard to predict how patients and doctors
are going to react to medical news.
Sales of
Merck 's (NYSE: MRK) and
Schering-Plough 's Vytorin plummeted after a
study
showedthat Vytorin plus a statin lowered cholesterol, but
didn't work any better than the statin alone at lowering the
amount of plaque in arteries.
sanofi-aventis ' (NYSE: SNY) long-lasting
insulin Lantus is
linkedto cancer, and what happens to sales? They jump
almost 22% year over year in the third quarter. Sorry
Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) and
Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO), no free lunch for
you.
In addition to managing the Lantus news quite well, Sanofi
managed a pretty solid quarter in general. Sales were up 8%,
helped slightly by a currency boost, but mostly because of
strong showings from Lantus, Lovenox, and Plavix, which it
sells with
Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY).
Of those three, the one to worry about is Lovenox. The
drug lost patent protection in the U.S. a while ago after
Teva Pharmaceutical (Nasdaq: TEVA) and
Amphastar Pharmaceuticals challenged the patent. But the drug
remains competition-free for now because the Food and Drug
Administration hasn't approved the application to sell
generic versions of the complex drug filed by Teva and
Amphastar, nor the one from
Novartis (NYSE: NVS) and
Momenta Pharmaceuticals . Unfortunately for
all the companies involved and their shareholders, there's no
way to know when those approvals will be handed down.
Assuming the FDA delay lasts through the fourth quarter,
we should see another solid performance from Sanofi thanks to
revenue from the swine flu rolling in. The company is giving
guidance for an 11% increase in adjusted earnings at constant
currencies.
Longer term, though,
predictingSanofi's future is about as hard as predicting
patients' reactions to medical news.
This article was originally published as
Shrugging Off the Side Effectson
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