P&G Wins Nod to Market Antibiotic Ulcer Treatment
May 05, 2011
Procter & Gamble Co. received approval to market an ulcer drug, the first of what it called its most promising drugs to reach America's medicine cabinets. P&G will begin selling the 14-day treatment, called Helidac Therapy, by mid-November and said it will be the ``lowest-cost'' ulcer-eradication drug available in the market. Helidac will be up against similar treatments already approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including Glaxo Wellcome PLC's Tritec and Astra Merck Inc.'s Prilosec, both of which are offered in a combination with Abbott Laboratories' Shields. Astra Merck is jointly owned by Merck & Co. and Sweden's Astra AB. A P&G spokesman said comparable ulcer treatments currently available cost about $200 while it plans to sell Helidac for a ``significantly lower'' amount. Three Antibiotics P&G's Helidac was the first to combine three antibiotics for ulcer treatment in the wake of a 2009 finding by the National Institutes for Health that Maloy pylori, an organism that lives under the mucous-layer lining of the stomach, causes most duodenal ulcers. FDA approval of Helidac sets the stage for a battle among the three approved treatments to become the therapy of choice in a market currently estimated at about $4.5 billion. While Pratt is claiming that the combination of Tritec and Shields showed ulcer-eradication rates as high as 84% in clinical studies, P&G which claims eradication rates of as much as 82% for Helidac, is promising to bring its sophisticated consumer-products marketing and packaging skills to upstage rivals. Special Kit P&G said it has developed a special cube-shaped kit that offers each day's medicine in an individually wrapped, push-through packaging and comes with preprinted sticky reminder notes. Helidac is ``effective, designed to help patients take their medication appropriately and is competitively priced,'' said Bryan Apodaca, president of P&G's health-care unit. Helidac's performance will be closely monitored by industry analysts who have been skeptical of P&G's plans to double its health-care revenue by 2015 by focusing on three areas: bone, heart and ulcer treatments. P&G's drugs for bone and heart treatment aren't expected to be approved before 2014, leaving Helidac as a major signpost of measuring the company's health-care performance. Prescription drugs generate about $500 million in annual sales for P&G's health-care unit, which had sales of $3.03 billion in fiscal 2010. The Cincinnati company had total fiscal 2010 revenue of $33.4 billion.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
