Bloggers are having a field day with the news that Pfizer Inc. is pulling the plug on the billion dollar inhaled insulin bong that sold only a few million dollars.
Check out John Mack's summary here.
Pfizer announced a whopping $2.8 billion dollar write-off related to Exubera making this debacle even more costly than torcetrapib and cementing Pfizer's reputation as unable to do anything right.
Image courtesy of Pharmagiles.
I humbly point out my post of a year ago, before anyone complained about Exubera.
On August 16, 2006 I wrote about Pfizer's insulin inhaler:
"And this year Exubera was launched, an insulin inhaler used for the treatment of type 1 and type 2 diabetes that has blockbuster potential. According to Pfizer. But look at the Exubra inhaler! It is BIG. A foot long, when unfolded, which makes it feel like a baseball bat. Think your girlfriend would like to haul that out of her handbag while seated in a restaurant? Common sense, folks. Common sense. NO ONE would be caught dead with this foot long pocket rocket in their pocket. Or handbag."
And common sense is clearly something Pfizer's management of late is lacking.
I would humbly point out my own post which pre-dates yours by a number of months (mine was from March 9, 2006). Everyone seems to be saying it was the bong design that killed this product, but the fact is, that's not what stopped doctors from prescribing it (why the heck would they care, they don't have to carry it around?), it was due to the stupidity of abandoning the worldwide standard of measure for insulin, forcing them to compute different dosages for Exubera insulin vs. every other type of insulin already on the market ... what harried doctor can be bothered to do that?
You're right about the common sense part being missing at Pfizer, but its not the size of the bong that did it (at least not exclusively), its a combination of stupid factors Pfizer never bothered to consider, among them, the unit of measure, the bulkiness of the inhaler, and above all else, the ridiculously high price set for a product that offered NO clinical advantage over existing therapies. Pfizer's mistake was its failure to cut the price when sales didn't take off, instead spending millions on a dumb ad campaign as if marketing insulin was similar to marketing Viagra. The real crime here was the fact that Pfizer didn't bother telling their partner Nektar that they were pulling the plug. Given Pfizer's weak pipeline, they really don't need a reputation among startups as a lousy partner, they need partnerships to fill in the huge gaps in their weak pipeline. The company continues to shoot themselves in the foot, even after this debacle IMHO.
Posted by: Scott | October 19, 2007 at 11:41 AM