Pfizer

WANT A REAL winner? Have your broker find you a "new" Pfizer Inc. stock. Certified Financial Planner Morry Zolet sends a note: "If you bought 100 shares of Pfizer Inc., when the company went public in 1944, you invested $4,950. You would now own 129,600 shares with a market value on December 31, 1998 of -- get this -- $16,200,000!""Many stocks are overpriced," says Money magazine, April, "but the ludicrous lust for Internet firms is by far the greatest market bubble of the 20th century."Instead of investing in an individual high-flying Internet stock -- where you could suffer big losses -- begin by buying an Internet mutual fund for diversification, such as PSE Tech 100 Index Portfolio, Munder NetNet Fund and Franklin DynaTech Fund.

A New Jersey conventioneer found beaten to death Wednesday night in his Fells Point hotel room was identified yesterday as Christopher William Jones, 37, a New Jersey man and an employee of Pfizer Inc.Also yesterday, detectives found his car, a 1999 GMC Yukon, but refused to say where it was found or give other details.Detectives would not say yesterday whether they had established a motive for the killing.Pub Date: 7/03/99

NEW YORK -- Pfizer Inc. urged shareholders of Warner-Lambert Co. yesterday to remove the company's directors as it stepped up pressure on the rival drug maker to accept a hostile takeover bid of $73 billion.Pfizer said it will begin soliciting shareholder votes as it tries to block a $70 billion friendly merger between Warner-Lambert and American Home Products Corp. Either transaction would create the world's largest drug maker.Warner-Lambert rejected Pfizer's bid and threatened to cancel the companies' partnership to market the cholesterol drug Lipitor, Warner-Lambert's best seller.

NATICK, Mass. -- Boston Scientific Corp., one of the top three U.S. makers of medical devices, said yesterday that it will buy Pfizer Inc.'s Schneider Worldwide unit for $2.1 billion in cash to give it more products for clearing clogged arteries.Pfizer, one of the world's biggest drugmakers, said in February that it was looking to sell Schneider, which makes stents used to prop open arteries and devices for angioplasty, a procedure to clear blood vessels.The move will help Boston Scientific compete with Johnson & Johnson, Guidant Corp.

Talk about a high-flying stock. Igen International Inc., a relatively unknown Gaithersburg biotechnology firm, has seen its share price zoom an astonishing 742 percent since April.Yesterday, shares jumped $4.5625 to an all-time high of $40 -- more than eight times its 52-week low of $4.75 of April 24. The fastest run-up in the company's stock price has occurred since Christmas, when shares traded at $12.75.Propelling the ascent is a recently signed deal with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and a thumbs-up from two investment funds tied to investment guru George Soros.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks fell yesterday, led by drug shares, after Pfizer Inc. reported that six patients taking the new impotence drug Viagra had died.The Dow Jones industrial average fell 17.93 to 9,114.44, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 4.17 to 1,110.47. The computer-heavy Nasdaq composite index dropped 15.99 to 1,805.00, its third straight drop.Pfizer fell $3.6875 to $105.4375. It's still unclear whether Viagra played a role in the deaths.Dell Computer Corp. led the drop in the Nasdaq, falling $1.4375 to $85.625 in its third straight decline.

William A. Wycoff didn't take the usual route into banking.He worked for a medical company, a tool manufacturer and a spice maker. But as a banker, he's making his mark.In January, the 49-year-old Wycoff was named president of Crestar Bank in Baltimore, after the Richmond, Va.-based banking company acquired Loyola Capital Corp., the city's last remaining big savings and loan.Wycoff had plenty of authority at Loyola.He was responsible for community banking operations as well as marketing and administration of the savings and loan.

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks began the seventh year of history's longest bull market yesterday with a surge that pushed the Dow Jones industrial average to its first close above 6,000. Unexpectedly strong profits from an array of companies ignited the advance.Auto and oil shares were spurred higher by surprisingly strong earnings from No. 3 carmaker Chrysler Corp. and the highest crude oil prices since the start of the Persian Gulf war in January 1991.The Dow industrials jumped 40.62, to 6,010.

Coast Guard site at Curtis BayThe U.S. Coast Guard is creating an engineering logistics center at Curtis Bay, resulting in 70 jobs being shifted to the Baltimore facility from headquarters in Washington, D.C.The new center, which will begin operating in October 1996, will provide worldwide logistics support for the Coast Guard.It will consolidate supply centers in Baltimore and Curtis Bay with several branches of the Coast Guard's naval engineering division, currently at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.

NEW YORK -- The biggest rally in U.S. government bonds in three months ended yesterday amid renewed concern the Federal Reserve will soon raise interest rates. Stocks also fell.Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan triggered the sell-off, which also helped push the dollar lower, by telling Congress that inflation may not be under control.The hint that the central bank might raise rates for a fifth time this year surprised investors who had been buying bonds in the past week. After Mr. Greenspan spoke, "sellers came into the market," said Andrew Brenner, senior trader at Nomura Securities Co. Ltd. "The bond market had a great tone; now it has a weak one."

WASHINGTON - -A landmark $2.3 billion health care fraud settlement announced Wednesday involving Pfizer Inc. has put the pharmaceutical industry on notice that its widespread and potentially criminal behavior in promoting drugs for unauthorized uses won't be tolerated by the Obama administration, government officials and legal experts said. But, they added, some companies will continue to risk prosecution for such questionable practices because the fines and penalties pale in comparison to the extraordinary profits that are being made on the widespread practice of marketing drugs for "off-label" uses that have not been approved by the federal government.

Towson U. gets U.S. development grant Towson University said yesterday that it has won $300,000 in federal grants to be used on economic development services in Baltimore and Western Maryland in the next three years. The Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration awarded the grants. Towson University, which plans to work with Frostburg State University on the Western Maryland services, said it used a 2005 grant from the federal agency to help Baltimore officials put together an economic development strategy and also to track worker skills and commuting patterns in Western Maryland.

For people with high cholesterol, the wait for a cheaper version of Lipitor has gotten longer. Pfizer Inc. announced an agreement yesterday to head off generic competition for its flagship drug until November 2011. The drugmaker said it settled patent litigation with Ranbaxy Laboratories, an Indian generic drugmaker that had threatened to market its own version of Lipitor, the world's best-selling medicine. The agreement delays Ranbaxy's generic version of Lipitor and is estimated to be worth billions of dollars in additional sales for Pfizer, which could have faced generic competition from Ranbaxy as early as March 2010.

Pfizer Inc. Shares fell 19 cents to $22.05. To prepare for competition from generic versions of its cholesterol medicine Lipitor, the world's largest drug maker will outsource more manufacturing and expand in China.

WASHINGTON -- Pfizer Inc. fought off a U.S. Supreme Court appeal that aimed to open the company's Lipitor cholesterol pill, the most widely prescribed drug in the world, to generic competition. The high court, without comment, turned away yesterday arguments from Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., which sought to block a patent extension that protects Lipitor in the United States through March 2010. A federal appeals court upheld the extension in August. Lipitor had sales of $12.9 billion last year and accounts for as much as 40 percent of Pfizer's profit.

Drug giant Pfizer Inc. said yesterday that it would lay off 10,000 workers and close several manufacturing and research sites in an effort to bolster earnings hurt by the loss of patent protection on certain drugs and setbacks in developing new products. The company said the employee reductions were equivalent to about 10 percent of its worldwide work force and would take place by the end of next year. Among the cuts would be a 20 percent reduction in its European sales force. That move would follow a similar reduction announced two months ago in the company's American sales force and is included in the 10,000 figure.

It is more blessed to give than to receive - which even goes for giant corporations and their executives. Unfortunately, not all embrace that message. Drugmaker Pfizer Inc. adhered to the basic philosophy by recently raising its dividend to shareholders after its stock dropped when it curtailed development of a potentially blockbuster drug. On the other hand, former executives of government-sponsored mortgage company Fannie Mae are refusing to give back bonus money they received as a result of improper accounting.

A leading government Alzheimer's researcher told a federal judge in Baltimore yesterday that he had no good explanation for why he improperly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed fees from a drug manufacturer while helping to control government-sponsored research with the same company. Before the judge imposed the agreed-upon sentence of two years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a restitution payment of $300,000, Pearson "Trey" Sunderland III, chief of the geriatric psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, said the conviction "humbled me in a way I've never experienced before."

A decision by Pfizer Inc. to halt tests of an experimental cholesterol drug because of increased death rates was a setback likely to provoke closer scrutiny - but not an end to efforts to bring similar medications to market. Pfizer announced plans Saturday to end a large clinical trial of the drug torcetrapib after independent researchers monitoring the tests told company officials of the problem. Torcetrapib was designed to raise levels of HDL, commonly called "good cholesterol." It was supposed to complement statins now on the market that lower LDL or "bad" cholesterol.

The news came to Pfizer's chief scientist, Dr. John L. LaMattina, as he was showering at 7 a.m. on Saturday: The company's most promising experimental drug, intended to treat heart disease, caused an increase in deaths and heart problems. Eighty-two people had died so far in a clinical trial, versus 51 people in the same trial who had not taken it. Within hours, Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, told more than 100 trial investigators to stop giving patients the drug, called torcetrapib.