Saturday, May 17, 2008

AstraZeneca's Seroquel Cleared for Bipolar Disorder (Update2)

AstraZeneca Plc, the U.K.'s second-largest drugmaker, won U.S. approval to widen the use of its Seroquel antipsychotic medicine to treat bipolar disorder, pitting the treatment against Eli Lilly & Co.'s top-selling Zyprexa and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s Abilify.

Patients may take the therapy as an adjunct to the standard treatments lithium or divalproex, London-based AstraZeneca said today in a statement.

Seroquel brought in $4.03 billion last year, making it AstraZeneca's second-best-selling product after Nexium for ulcers. AstraZeneca is trying to broaden the medicine's use to protect sales under threat from generic copies. The drugmaker this month asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve the therapy to treat generalized anxiety disorder.

``Seroquel is increasingly being rolled out for additional indications and may, in due course, become the go-to product for depressive disorders,'' Charles Stanley analyst Jeremy Batstone-Carr said in an e-mail.

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