The world's largest drugmaker is testing Selzentry, the AIDS pill, against a form of arthritis affecting about 1 percent of people worldwide. Only eight of 26 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg rate the New York-based company a buy, mostly because it will lose $20 billion in revenue after 2011 when patents expire on the cholesterol- lowering pill, Lipitor, and other Pfizer medicines. Pfizer created a unit this year to find different uses for existing medicines, and the arthritis project may double Selzentry's anticipated annual sales to $1 billion. Pfizer began testing Selzentry for rheumatoid arthritis after researchers in the late 1990s found that the arthritis progresses more slowly in patients with a particular variation of the protein, called CCR5. In the current trial, one group receives maraviroc, the generic name for Selzentry, and another drug, methotrexate, an approved treatment that scientists say may work by muting the immune system. read more

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Afternoon DJ Mac Watson mugs his “radio face” from the booth of WRVA 1140 in his final few hours as the voice of drive time. He’s narrated talk radio fans’ afternoon drive on WRVA since 2004, but now he’s heading west. A hybrid of Glenn Beck’s sense of humor and passion and Neal Boortz’s intellect and talk savvy. An opinion that is backed with passion and intellectual reasoning, and most of all a talk radio host needs to be not should be needs to be entertaining. Rush is the radio god who saved talk radio. read more

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