Made in Sandwich: a 'star' drug for Aids and a shot in the arm for Pfizer

A few moths ago, the outlook for Pfizer darkened. The world's largest drugs company had been harbouring high hopes for a potential "blockbuster" cholesterol drug called torcetrapib, which was in the final stages of development. But in December those hopes were crushed when Pfizer was forced to scrap the drug after it was linked in trials to increased death rates. With that failure, nearly $1bn (£508m) and several years of research went down the pan.

The company is in desperate need of a new star drug. In maraviroc, a novel HIV treatment that suppresses the onset of Aids symptoms, Pfizer hopes it has found one. US and European regulators decided last month to fast-track their reviews of the medicine, which was developed at the labs in Sandwich in Kent, the US company's European headquarters and the largest research and development site in Europe.

"This is the biggest thing to come out of here in 10 years," enthused Mark Edwards, Pfizer's senior director of science policy at Sandwich.

The site looks an unlikely place to develop what could be among the world's most effective treatment for Aids. From the outside, it resembles what could be a futuristic penal colony. Security is high and the cluster of squat, non-descript buildings - strung together by elevated hallways - is ringed by a fence topped with razor-wire.

Inside, labs teeming with white-coated boffins use some of the most highly specialised research equipment in the world to weed out duds early in the process, before years of work and millions of dollars are potentially frittered away on them.

"We don't want another torcetrapib. It was a total disaster," said Mr Edwards. "We're trying to de-risk the process, and at an earlier stage."

Viagra, the last major breakthrough to come out of Sandwich, did not save people's lives or improve their health. But the erectile-dysfunction treatment has been a global success that has run up billions in sales.

Barring regulatory surprises, maraviroc is expected to hit the market later this year - a full decade after Viagra's launch. It would be a much-needed dose of good news.

A lot was riding on torcetrapib. It was seen as the crucial add-on to Pfizer's best-selling cholesterol treatment, Lipitor, whose $12.8bn (£6.5bn) in annual sales represents a quarter of Pfizer's business. But Lipitor has just four years left before it loses patent protection and most of those sales disappear as copycat drugs companies make their own versions. Analysts claim Pfizer doesn't have enough new drugs in its pipeline to fill the void.

A month after the torcetrapib debacle, chief executive Jeffrey Kindler announced a sweeping restructuring, including up to 10,000 job cuts, as Pfizer struggled to offset losses from expiring patents. Since then, there has been increasing pressure to come up with new drugs. "We are looking to move our Phase 3 portfolio on as rapidly as possible. Lipitor is 25 per cent of our business," said Annette Doherty, site director at Sandwich.

Between 2001 and 2006, Pfizer submitted just 19 new medicines to regulators for approval. During that same period, the company spent more than $35bn on research and development. Such anaemic production is common throughout the industry.

Mr Kindler is pushing through a "delayering" of the company's research units. That includes a reshuffling of expertise into centres of excellence. The goal, said Ms Doherty, is to triple the number of drugs that the company has in Phase 3 trials within the next two years and to churn out six new treatments annually.

In Sandwich, the scale and precision of the approach is mind-boggling. It includes using techniques such as high-throughput screens where robots test the company's vast library of three million compounds against targets thought to have a role in the spread of disease. But such painstaking work takes time: it needed 10 years to get maraviroc from an idea to something regulators are now considering - and that is seen as fast.

At its peak, analysts expect maraviroc to generate $500m in annual sales. It will help countless patients avoid suffering. But with a multi-billion-dollar hole looming, it won't go far in curing Pfizer's ills.