In quest of potency
The battle of the bulge doesn't stop with the consumer. Pharmaceutical giants are vying for the premium position in marketing lifestyle drugs. And mergers seem to be the best way to cut the opponents to size.
Paris-based Sanofi-Synthelabo has offered to buy out its French rival Aventis for us $60.1 billion. If the deal materialises, it would create the world's third largest pharmaceutical firm. The move is a leap towards developing a market for lifestyle drugs for disorders that plague the modern world. These include obesity and depression.
For instance, lifestyle drug Rimonabant has proved effective in early trials in helping obese people lose weight by stimulating parts of the brain through cannabis. Sanofi hopes such medicines could, in turn, reduce the incidence of diseases like diabetes, which can be related to obesity. Most of the global pharmaceutical giants are gearing up to grab a piece of the pie in the largely untapped lifestyle drugs segment, which constitutes a huge market.
If Sanofi succeeds in convincing Aventis' shareholders, it can promote its forthcoming drugs in the world's biggest market. But Aventis plans to spurn the Sanofi bid, contending that the price quoted is low. Aventis chairperson Igor Landau also argues that one of Sanofi's drugs faces legal battles in the us.
For its part, the French government is seeing the merger bid as a prized move, since it would offer the country an opportunity to compete with the us and Asia in the field of pharmaceutical research.