First of All, Brand New Statins Come Up

Merck - for many years the world's biggest pharmaceutical company - managed to obtain lovastatin from the US Army, file a patent, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mankind had entered 'The age of the statin'.

Cue celestial music - Star Waf! theme music meets Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy; that sort of thing. And 10 it was written that Merck, clutching the great staff of Mevacor (the brand name of lovastatin) led the chosen opinion leaders to the Holy Land, a land of great bounty, where fruit hung low from the trees.

A land of milk and honey where if you were a cardiologist lucky enough to run a clinical trial on statins huge extensions and swimming pools miraculously appeared next to your house. And the year of 'statination' was 1987, in which Merck launched lovastatin.
And there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from other pharmaceutical companies, who had missed a trick. But they rapidly whipped their research bods into action, crying, 'Find me another HMG-CoA enzyme inhibitor, or else you shall be cast into the outer darkness'.

Thus, over the years, several other'statins' have appeared. Merck tripped over another one called simvastatin (now sold over the counter as Zocor Heart Pro, in the UK). Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) stumbled across pravastatin. Fluvastatin landed at the feet of Ciba (now part of Novartis). Warner Lambert found atorvastatin lying in a small basket in the rushes; then sold marketing rights to Pfizer. Worst business decision ever made?

Atorvastatin is the world's biggestselling drug, with profits that would make your eyes water. Bayer mixed the wrong chemicals together and discovered cerivastatin, so powerful that it allegedly killed hundreds of patients and had to be withdrawn (multi-billion-dollar lawsuits pending). Most recently, we have had rosuvastatin (Crestor), synthesized in Japan, sold to AstraZeneca, and marketed with ruthless determination. All of these drugs make billions and billions of dollars of profit for their companies.
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