Pfizer Inc. has announced that its global R&D network, marking an important step in implementing a new R&D model as part of the integration of Pfizer and Wyeth. This global network brings together scientific strengths from both companies, continues efforts to increase research productivity, focuses disease-area research in single locations and more efficiently uses the company's real estate. Pfizer will have five main research sites that will serve as central hubs for research activities in biotherapeutics, pharmatherapeutics and vaccines. These sites are: Cambridge, Massachusetts; Groton, Connecticut; Pearl River, New York; La Jolla, California; and Sandwich, UK. These research-oriented laboratories will be supplemented by specialized research capabilities, such as monoclonal antibody discovery in San Francisco, regenerative medicine work in Cambridge, UK, and R&D activities in Shanghai, China. As part of the consolidation of research sites, Pfizer will significantly reduce R&D activities at some of its sites. In addition, Pfizer will consolidate R&D functions from its New London, Connecticut, site to its nearby research facility in Groton, Connecticut.

Pfizer Inc., which bought rival Wyeth last month, announced that it would move 'a number of functions' from Wyeth's Collegeville, Montgomery County, location as Pfizer consolidated research and development at five 'hub' sites. Pfizer would not immediately say how many jobs would be eliminated at Collegeville-Wyeth's long-term pharmaceutical headquarters-where it employs 3,600. The decision could affect hundreds of jobs, said one employee, who did not want to be identified. About 800 people work in research and development in Collegeville.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld a jury verdict in Donna Scroggin v. Wyeth, et al. awarding Scroggin $2.7 million in compensatory damages for the breast cancer she developed after taking Prempro. However, the appeals court vacated the more than $27 million in punitive damages the jury levied against Wyeth and Pharmacia & Upjohn, a separate Pfizer unit that makes Provera (medroxyprogesterone acetate), one of the components of Prempro. The court remanded the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas for a new trial to determine the punitive damages.