Vytorin Pain May Be Abbott's Gain

3/31 - "What’s bad for Merck and Schering-Plough may be good for Abbott Laboratories. Yesterday’s downbeat discussion about Vytorin at a meeting of caridologists may lead doctors to look farther for alternative cholesterol treatments when statins aren’t getting the job done. The search may lead them to Abbott.

Abbott markets niacin-based drugs called Niaspan and SimCor (a combination of Niaspan and generic Zocor) as well as a fibrate drug called TriCor. Both niacins and fibrates are classes of cholesterol medicines that the New England Journal of Medicine calls suitable for use when first-line treatments (read: statins) have failed."

"Don’t count Merck out of the cholesterol franchise yet. It presented data on its comparison of its investigational niacin drug Cordaptive to Abbott’s Niaspan, reporting that patients experienced less significantly flushing and dropp...