Acomplia online
In the latest sign that things are going will with Merck’s development of a competitor to diet drug Acomplia (medicine acomplia), the pharmaceutical giant is bringing back Len Tacconi to serve as global brand leader for its weight-loss drug taranabant.

Tacconi, who left Merck less than a year ago to become president of Discovery Health, spent a decade with Merck orchestrating high-spending consumer marketing campaigns for drugs that included Singulair, Zocor and Vioxx.

Before joining Merck, Tacconi had led North American marketing for acomplia online Weight Watchers.

While Merck continues to say little about the Phase III trials of taranabant, a cannabinoid-1 (medicine acomplia) receptor inverse agonist that has a mechanism of action similar to that of Sanofi-Aventis’ rimonabant, the company has said it plans to seek FDA approval for taranabant next year.

Sanofi-Aventis withdrew its application to market Acomplia in the United States in June after an FDA advisory panel recommended against approving it due to concerns over psychiatric side effects. Sanofi is not expected to refile with the FDA before the Merck filing.

Pfizer is working on what has been called a cannabinoid receptor antagonist, called CP-945598,medicine acomplia which also is in Phase III trials, but has not indicated when it hopes to file for FDA approval.
Just how badly sales of diet drug Acomplia (rimonabant) have been set back by Sanofi’s inability to bring it to the U.S. market was dramatically illustrated July 25th when GlaxoSmithKline revealed initial launch results for over-the-counter diet pill alli (low-dose Xenical).

Sales of non-prescription alli totaled a surprising $156 million in the weeks after its U.S. launch in mid-June -acomplia online- a sales surge that dwarfs the monthly sales of Acomplia in all the countries where it is on the market in the European Union.

If most of the alli sales were to people initially buying a one-month supply of the over-the-counter diet pill acomplia online, the sales figure would suggest that more than 1 million Americans decided to try the first FDA-approved non-prescription weight-loss product in its first weeks on the market.

By contrast, in the European Union, where Acomplia was approved for sale last summer, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 are believed to have tried it over the course of a year.

Sanofi had initially hoped that Acomplia — which was to be sold in the United States as Zimulti -Title : Acomplia- would be a blockbuster drug with sales that could even exceed $5 billion worldwide.
Sanofi-Aventis still believes there is a good chance diet drug Acomplia (rimonabant) ultimately will be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for marketing in the United States, according to the company’s head of German operations Heinz-Werner Meier.

“That subject has not yet been written off,”Title : Acomplia” Sanofi’s head of German operations Heinz-Werner Meier told the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung on July 22nd.

Meier said the FDA may demand that Acomplia be contraindicated for patients with depressive illnesses, which is very similar to the stiffer warnings the European Medicine Agency proposed a week ago in allowing the diet drug to remain on the market in European Union countries.

Sanofi last month temporarily gave up on efforts to market Acomplia in the United States, pulling its application after an FDA expert advisory panel unanimously recommended against allowing the diet drug to be sold in the U.S. because of concerns over depressive side effects including suicidal thoughts.Title : Acomplia

“We have lost time in America, so there will be economic consequences,” Meier told Sueddeutsche Zeitung. While some analysts had earlier estimated that Acomplia could be a $5 billion drug, without the U.S. market, few expect the diet pill to have total worldwide sales of more than $500 million.