The Big Get Bigger

In case you missed it, Pfizer, the 800 pound Gorilla of Big Pharma, just ate Wyeth. I can tell you in the little town of Collegeville, where Wyeth has a site, there is immediate concern, not just about friends and neighbors, but about the town in general. (Although, GSK also has a site here, but still 8000 jobs are probably gone.)

What does it mean for FBDD? Wyeth has an active group in Boston and Pfizer has one in San Diego. I think there are also groups scattered at other sites (Groton ?).

Here are the key 'grafs:

The deal came as New York-based Pfizer set out a full house of issues: a 90 percent drop in income, a hefty charge to end an investigation, a severe cut in its dividend, a shockingly low profit forecast for 2009 and 8,000 job cuts starting immediately.

That's all on top of the colossal problem triggering this deal: the expected loss of $13 billion a year in revenue for cholesterol fighter Lipitor starting in November 2011, when it gets generic competition.

Pfizer also plans by 2011 to cut about 8,190 jobs, 10 percent of its workforce, as part of what it expects will be a staff reduction totaling 15 percent of the combined companies' workers -- implying a total job loss of almost 20,000.

That's a lot of jobs lost, a lot of them will be R&D. I can't imagine that Pfizer will want more than one FBDD group when many companies have zero. I think we will see many colleagues out of a job, fragment and non-fragment.


There are >48,000 hits for Pfizer wyeth merger as of 9pm EST. There is lots of excellent analysis. I wpn't try to duplicate the efforts of others much better at that than I.