NEW YORK—Following unforeseen complications during a trial of the company’s new cholesterol medication Lipodrin, researchers at pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer said they were forced to put down another batch of test patients out of mercy Friday. “Initially the results were very promising, but after a third of our patients showed troubling side effects we had to make the difficult decision to terminate the subject group—at that point, it was the only humane thing to do,” said lead researcher Richard Dunn, confirming that this was the second test group in a week that had to be eliminated, following a group of 30 arthritis sufferers who had responded poorly to a new 300 mg formulation of Celebrex. “This is often an unfortunate part of the development stage, but I can assure you that not all is lost; with what we’ve been able to learn from this now-deceased cohort, we’re almost certain to earn FDA approval after the next series of trials.” Dunn further expressed his dismay that, since there was no longer anything to compare them against, the members of the study’s control group would also need to be euthanized.

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