Pfizer announced in a memo to employees – later passed on to news agency Bloomberg – that it is ending early stage development of at least eleven drugs for a range of diseases: they include six for obesity and heart disease, and three for digestive disorders, which appear to be classified as ‘unprofitable’.

The current focus won't affect drugs in the last of three stages of testing, such as anti-clot drug apixaban being developed with Bristol-Myers Squibb. The restructuring won´t result in facility closures and many employees will be shifted to other areas of research, the company said.

In March this year, Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler stated that the New York-based company would focus on medicines for cancer, pain, Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. Pfizer´s blockbuster cholesterol pill Lipitor, the world´s first-placed drug in sales, with over $ 6.1 billion dollars earnings in the first half of this year ($ 12.7 billion dollars in 2007) will be losing patent protection in 2011, and the company has been concentrating on restructuring around the expected drop in revenue.

Products for cancer and pain are typically more profitable because the makers can charge a higher price, and there is less competition.

“Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, inflammation/immunology, oncology, pain and psychoses (schizophrenia) are confirmed as our higher priority areas,'' the company said in the memo. “These large markets, with rapidly advancing science, are the areas where Pfizer can take a leading position.''

Analysts have been speculating on whether the unnamed company reportedly considering acquiring ImClone Systems, may not be Pfizer, in a bid to add to its pipeline the potentially profitable monoclonal antibody IMC-11F8, a successor to ImClone´s blockbuster cancer drug Erbitux. It might also add the complication of a dispute over the rights to both Erbitux and the pipeline drug between ImClone and Bristol-Myers Squibb. (see today´s article on ImClone, networkmedica.com).

Pfizer has today updated its drug development pipeline - a total of 114 drugs in different stages: 50 are in Phase I, 38 in Phase II, 25 in Phase III, and one awaiting the U.S. regulating agency´s approval: Fablyn, for osteoporosis.

About 20 percent of Pfizer´s R&D funding currently goes toward cancer.

Pfizer has closed research labs in Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo, Michigan; Nagoya, Japan; and Amboise, France, and fired more than 10,000 employees company-wide since January 2007. The company is still developing plans to phase out testing on the drugs it will cancel and may license some of them to other drugmakers.

Pfizer previously said it will cut as much as $ 2 billion dollars in costs this year throughout the company. It has not specified how many jobs will be lost as part of those cuts.