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TRENTON — Pfizer Inc. will begin selling dozens more generic drugs through new deals with an Indian generic company, becoming the latest brand-name drugmaker looking to expand in a generics market growing because of the push to cut medical costs and the recession.
Pfizer's Greenstone subsidiary already sells more than 300 Pfizer medicines that have lost patent protection but still brought in a combined $10 billion last year. Those include former blockbusters Zoloft for depression, Norvasc for high blood pressure, Zithromax for bacterial infections and Medrol for inflammatory and immune conditions such as asthma, arthritis and lupus.
Now the established products unit at New York-based Pfizer, created as part of its reorganization last fall into more-focused business units, announced Tuesday that it has reached agreements with Aurobindo Pharma Ltd. to produce and sell competitors' drugs that have lost patent protection in the U.S. and Europe.
The deal includes 39 pills that will be sold in the U.S., 20 of which will also be sold across Europe, and 12 injectable antibiotic medicines. Pfizer will handle the marketing after licensing each product from Aurobindo, which will handle all the steps to get approval to make generic versions, as well as manufacture them.
In this country, the recession is boosting sales of generic drugs, which cost 30 percent to 80 percent less than the original brand-name ones. The number of prescriptions for generic drugs jumped 8 percent last year, and they now account for 68 percent of all prescriptions filled, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
Shares of Pfizer initially rose nearly 3 percent Tuesday morning before falling back with the rest of the market, to a midday level of $11.79, up 13 cents.
Pfizer isn't disclosing the names of the competitors' drugs it will target, but said they are for conditions including heart disease and brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.
"We're targeting by 2013 to generate more than $1 billion in incremental sales for the company through portfolio expansion," David Simmons, president and general manager of the established products unit, told the The Associated Press in an interview.
He said Pfizer also is considering how best to market all those off-patent drugs in emerging markets such as China, Russia and India.
At the same time, several brand-name drugmakers now are getting into generics through acquisitions, and others have done it by licensing rights to a generic company on a case-by-case basis, said analyst Les Funtleyder of Miller Tabak & Co.
"It's not a bad move" and fits into Pfizer's recent diversification strategy, said Funtleyder. "It actually behooves Pfizer to bolster its generic unit because generics are going to play a big role in health care reform."
More generic versions of the same drug lead to lower prices, a boon for consumers who already can get hundreds of popular generics for $4 a month from several discount and grocery chains, but that limits drugmakers' profit on them.
Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG has sold generics for years through its Sandoz unit.
Last week, French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis SA completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of Czech pharmaceutical firm Zentiva N.V., which makes and sells generic drugs in Central and Eastern Europe. Sanofi also is reportedly the frontrunner, ahead of Britain's GlaxoSmithKline PLC, in a bidding war for Indian generic company Piramal Healthcare Ltd.
Last November, Japan's Daiichi Sankyo Co. bought a majority stake in Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., India's largest pharmaceutical company and one of the world's biggest generic makers, for $4 billion.
Meanwhile, there's a similar trend in the market for biotech drugs, which are made in living cells and until now have had no generic versions allowed in the U.S. Once President Obama was elected in November, drugmakers began expecting that new rules to enable approval for generic biotech drugs would follow.
By December, Merck & Co. said it was launching a new division called Merck BioVentures to make both new and generic biotech drugs, and Eli Lilly and Co.'s chief executive said his company was considering delving into generic biotech drugs, too.
Simmons, the Pfizer executive, noted that the market for off-patent prescription drugs is now about $270 billion but is expected to nearly double to more than $500 billion in the next five years.
Pfizer wants part of that growth. It made its first deal with Aurobindo, one of the world's biggest generic drugmakers, last July, to bring four other drugs to the U.S. market, including the widely used antibiotic amoxicillin.
Last year, Medrol, anti-anxiety drug Xanax, injectable contraceptive Depo-Provera and two other medicines marketed by the Greenstone subsidiary got beefed-up marketing and other extra attention to see whether their generally steady decline in annual revenue could be stopped. Three with decreasing sales had sales jumps last year, one with flat sales in 2007 saw 6 percent growth last year and one saw a small sales increase from 2007 nearly double.
(This version CORRECTS second-to-last paragraph to say deal included four other drugs, not five.)
