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Big Pharma: Pfizer gobbles up Wyeth; Employment: The layoffs keep piling up; GE: A worrisome earnings report; Real estate: Toll Brothers sweetens the pot; International: The Satyam plot thickens

Big Pharma: Pfizer gobbles up Wyeth

Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, agreed this week to buy rival Wyeth for $68 billion, said Shannon Pettypiece in Bloomberg.com. Pfizer makes cholesterol fighter Lipitor, the world’s best-selling drug, with $12 billion in annual sales. But Lipitor’s patent expires in 2011, and Pfizer has nothing in its development pipeline to replace it. Wyeth’s Effexor antidepressant and its Prevnar pneumonia vaccine will offset some of the lost sales, and “Wyeth plans to seek U.S. approval this year for a new version of Prevnar that would fight six additional strains of pneumonia.”

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