The research chief of Roche Holding AG said the company's experimental drug to raise "good" HDL cholesterol has the potential to generate annual sales of $10 billion and may have advantages over a rival medicine being developed by Merck & Co Inc . "This is the order of magnitude we are looking at," Jean-Jacques Garaud said in an interview on Friday, when asked if his dalcetrapib drug could produce annual sales in the $10 billion range. That would make it a mega-blockbuster heart drug in the same league as today's biggest cholesterol fighter, Pfizer Inc's Lipitor. Lipitor and other current top-selling cholesterol drugs work instead by lowering "bad" LDL cholesterol.
