Astra's Crestor fails to outshine Lipitor

2nd Sep 2011 07:53

The eagerly awaited headline results from a clinical trial comparing AstraZeneca's cholesterol treatment Crestor to Pfizer's Lipitor have been released, and have not delivered the knock-out blow that the company was hoping for.The results for the primary efficacy measure of the study demonstrated a numerically greater reduction in favour of Crestor versus atorvastatin but did not reach statistical significance. For the secondary intravascular ultrasound measure, which was change from baseline in total atheroma volume (TAV) within the targeted coronary artery, Crestor demonstrated a statistically significant reduction compared with atorvastatin.Tolerability and efficacy of Crestor seen in SATURN ((Study of Coronary Atheroma by InTravascular Ultrasound: Effect of Rosuvastatin Versus AtorvastatiN) were in line with previous studies and approved product labelling, the company said.Astra's shareholders were hoping that the SATURN results would demonstrate clear superiority to US pharmaceutical company Pfizer's Lipitor product, just as Lipitor is about to go off-patent - an event that will open the door to rivals to produce generic versions of Lipitor.Crestor is already Astra's biggest selling drug and had global sales of $5.7bn in 2010. --jh