Wyeth Ventures Into Obesity Drug Graveyard

Wyeth will pay $120 million to Thiakis to obtain its anti-obesity drug candidate, TKS1225. In doing so, Wyeth has taken its first, expensive step into a disease category that many drug companies have entered, and all have failed. Obesity is a classic graveyard of failed drug brands. There’s a good reason why, and BNET readers will remember when Derek Lowe first explained it back in July:

Evolutionary pressures have been too strong — our metabolisms try to make absolutely sure that we have plenty of reserves against the lean times, because over most of the history of our species, it’s been nothing but lean times….

So many of the weight loss drug attempts have been in the area of appetite suppression — stop the problem before it develops. But you run into those multiple pathways there, too — any animals whose feeding behaviors can be easily shut down are long dead. We’re the descendants of the opposite population: the ones that scrambled for food no matter what.

Here’s a list of companies that have tried to find a business in weight loss drugs — and failed:

• Pfizer in November scrapped its anti-fat drug, the unnamed “CP-945,598,” for “regulatory” reasons.
• Sanofi-Aventis in November announced that it was ending its trials on Acomplia/Zimulti, an obesity pill that was approved and then yanked in Europe.
• Merck in November pulled its fat pill, taranabant, from its pipeline.
• GlaxoSmithKline has had dissappointing sales from Alli so far.
• Roche had negligible sales from Xenical, the Rx version of Alli.
• Solvay in November also abandoned its attempt to bring an anti-fat pill to market.
• Abbott Labs sold Meridia, but it failed to take off due to cardiovascular concerns.

It was Wyeth itself that was forced to abandon its marketing of fen-phen, a weight loss product that damaged patients’ hearts and resulted in massive lawsuits against the company. Wyeth also abandoned Redux after similar legal action. So it will be a miracle if Wyeth has discovered something that everyone else has overlooked.

• Interested in other Pharma graveyards?
• Check out BNET’s coverage of attempts to develop “Viagra for Women.”