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Pharma & Bio Ingredients
"For me, it's a positive surprise," Prudential analyst Tim Anderson said of the forecast, which helped lift Pfizer shares 2 percent.
The company provided its outlook at the beginning of an all-day meeting with industry analysts to review its array of experimental drugs and their progress in clinical trials. The meeting is being held at Pfizer's research facilities in Groton, CT.
Company officials said two of its experimental obesity drugs significantly reduced body weight, at magnitudes comparable to Sanofi-Aventis' potent drug, Acomplia.
Pfizer, which has vowed to become a major player in the cancer field, said it plans to begin 10 late-stage trials of oncology treatments through 2008.
One medicine called CP-675,206 has the potential to become the new "standard of care" for melanoma, Pfizer said, with overall survival of patients in early-stage trials of 16.5 months -- compared with 6 months to 9 months for those taking standard treatments.
Pfizer also said it hopes by the second half of 2007 to seek U.S. approval for the most important product in its pipeline, a drug called torcetrapib that raises levels of "good" HDL cholesterol.
The updated 2006 forecast, which it said follows "a favorable trend in revenues and lower costs in the fourth quarter," translates into profit growth of at least 6.2 percent this year.
"I don't know that it's earthshaking, but it's definitely positive," Deutsche Bank analyst Barbara Ryan said of the forecast.
The world's largest drugmaker said it still expects earnings per share, excluding special items, to grow, on average, at high-single-digit percentage rates in 2007 and 2008.
But the earnings growth is expected to come largely through continued aggressive cost cutting as the New York-based company struggles with competition from generic forms of its medicines and a dearth of important new product launches.
Hundreds of analysts and money managers attended the event, at which recently appointed Pfizer Chief Executive Jeffrey Kindler touted the company's pipeline of experimental drugs as a reason for continuing to have faith in the struggling drugmaker.
Pfizer shares have plunged in recent years due to declining profit growth and the inability of the company's $7 billion-a-year research program to bear impressive fruit -- main reasons that Kindler was chosen in July to replace longtime CEO Hank McKinnell.
"Based on our pipeline, our ambition is to create a company with a more diversified product portfolio, with a heavy emphasis in the therapeutic areas offering the greatest medical promise and commercial potential," Kindler said.
Increased numbers of drugs currently in late-stage testing at Pfizer's laboratories should produce four new products a year by 2011, the company said, including treatments for cancer, clogged arteries, obesity, diabetes and blood clots.
Moreover, the company said it expects by 2010 to secure two new products a year from acquisitions, partnerships or licensing deals with other drugmakers.
Pfizer announced at the meeting a five-year research collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute to evaluate new high-tech methods of attacking diseases such as cancer, diabetes and mental illness.
"The collaboration will involve the development of new tests to rapidly validate approaches," Pfizer said.
