Promising more shots on goal

With investors in big pharma spending a lot of time worrying about how companies will maintain their growth rates, Pfizer Inc. and Novartis AG last week devoted considerable time at their R&D days to showing investors what their pipelines look like now and where they are expected to be in the next three to five years. While not offering an apples-to-apples comparison - PFE used Phase III programs as its metric while NVS chose marketing applications - the message was that each company expects to significantly raise the number of annual new product approvals.

PFE CEO Jeffrey Kindler told investors that the company's pipeline was larger than ever before - comprising 77 potential line extensions and 153 new molecular entities. As recently as 2002, PFE was working on 71 line extensions and only 94 NMEs...