Pharmaprojects R&D Pipeline News Feed
Adverse events result in the termination of Pfizer's CETP inhibitor torcetrapib
7 Dec 2006
Only 2 days after Pfizer held its analyst meeting in New York, the US, it announced on December 2nd 2006 that it has terminated the development of the late-stage candidate torcetrapib.
Following routine monitoring of the ILLUMINATE morbidity and mortality study, which compared torcetrapib to atorvastatin calcium, the Data Safety Monitoring Board highlighted that there was an imbalance of morbidity and cardiovascular events on torcetrapib. Pfizer immediately contacted the FDA and was in the process of notifying all clinical investigators in the programme as well as other regulatory authorities.
Cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibition was highlighted as: "The most important new development in cardiovascular medicine in years," by John L LaMattina, President of Pfizer Global Research & Development during the R&D Analyst meeting on November 30th so the news was understandably surprising and disappointing. CEO Jeffrey B Kindler commented: "We understand the challenge that this represents and we will respond quickly and aggressively to it".
