When Cures Become Too Costly

Here’s some troubling news from the Wall Street Journal :

In a striking shift, Pfizer Inc. will abandon efforts to develop medicines for heart disease, as part of a broad research reshuffling it announced Tuesday.

Pfizer will be leaving a field that includes its cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor and other medicines that fueled the company’s dominance of the pharmaceutical industry for more than a decade.

The beleaguered New York pharmaceutical giant also is exiting therapies for obesity and bone health, to focus on more-profitable areas, such as cancer.

Of course, increasing efforts to find treatments and cures for cancer is a good thing. But I wish we didn’t have to stop developing medicines for America’s number one killer in order to do so.