Johnson & Johnson will cut back on manufacturing and development of heart stents, even halting sales of its best seller, as tougher competition and a flat market have sharply cut into sales.
J&J also will scrap jobs, shutter two factories and take a charge of $500 million to $600 million as it reorganizes its Cordis heart device business.

The New Brunswick, N.J., company said Wednesday that Cordis will stop making Cypher and Cypher Select drug-coated stents by year-end, and it will also stop development of a drug-coated stent called Nevo. Cordis will focus on other areas of the heart device market where there is greater demand.

Stents are mesh-wire tubes used to hold arteries open after they are surgically cleared of fatty plaque. Newer generations of stents are coated with drugs to prevent scar tissue from forming over the tube and blocking the artery months after the procedure.

Cypher once was the market leader and is still J&J's top-selling stent, but its market share has fallen steadily over the last several years as rivals Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific Corp. and Medtronic Inc. have introduced new stents and grabbed customers.
The company will eliminate up to 1,000 jobs as it consolidates a research and development team and shuts two manufacturing plants, the San German, Puerto Rico plant where Cypher is made and one in Cashel, Ireland, where Nevo was to be manufactured.

Viagra patent fight
Patent protection and product pipelines are top priorities for every pharmaceutical manufacturer, which is why Pfizer Inc. and Teva Pharmaceuticals International Ltd. will be in federal court in Norfolk, Va., starting today as Pfizer fights to keep exclusive rights to Viagra through 2019.

Pfizer sells about $1 billion worth of the little blue pills per year in the United States to help men with erectile dysfunction, amounting to about 2.5 percent of the company's sales.

Along with other pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer has been fretting because some top-selling drugs are nearing the dates at which generic-pharmaceutical firms can produce and sell similar products for less money. The pipelines are connected because pharmaceutical leaders worry that few blockbusters are coming along to replace the older moneymakers.