WSJ health columnist Melinda Beck reminds us of how osteoporosis continues to be a serious health problem for 10 million Americans who suffer from it and 34 million who are at risk. It’s no wonder then that the drug industry continues to develop medicines to treat the condition, creating a competitive market for osteoporosis treatments that include the popular Boniva made by Roche, Merck’s Fosamax and Novartis’s Reclast. Today, new data on Wyeth’s investigational drug bazodoxifene, otherwise known as Viviant, suggest that the treatment prevents vertebral fractures in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis better than a placebo after five years, the company announced . But Wyeth has had trouble getting the drug approved in the U.S. In May, it received, for the third time, a letter from the FDA delaying an approval decision . The FDA wanted further analysis about the rate of stroke and other events related to blood clots, and also had some questions about data collection. Wyeth

expects to file a response by year end to the FDA’s latest letter. The drug was approved in Europe and will be launched “on a country-by-country basis as appropriate” beginning in 2010, according to a Wyeth spokesman. Pfizer has also suffered approval delays with its osteoporosis drug Fablyn, which was twice rejected before the company announced in January that the FDA was delaying its decision to approve the drug until it got more information about a possible increase in deaths, according to Bloomberg . Next month, the FDA is expected to make a decision on Amgen’s denosumab, which came out of a recent FDA advisory committee meeting with mixed reviews. The FDA said clinical-trial patients taking denosumab had a slightly elevated rate of serious infections and certain cancers than patients who received a placebo, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Image: iStockphoto

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From the Osteoporosis Front, Updates on Potential New Drugs