Wyeth's chief financial officer said the U.S. drugmaker "will probably fail" in its goal to develop treatments for Alzheimer's disease but the risk is justified by the potentially big payoffs to society and to the company.

Kenneth Martin, whose company is developing 11 experimental Alzheimer's treatments, gave the assessment at the annual Lehman Brothers Global Healthcare Conference in Miami on Tuesday.

The research program "will probably fail," the CFO said, because of the difficulty of developing drugs against such a tough disease, which destroys memory and eventually leads to death and for which there are so far no very effective treatments.

Martin later said he had not meant to cast doubt on the company's entire slate of Alzheimer's products and indeed believes Wyeth is in the vanguard of research, even though individual projects may fall by the wayside.

"The point is this is an extremely difficult disease, but because of the breadth of our program and the different ways we are attempting to attack it, we may have a higher likelihood of succeeding than anybody," Martin told Reuters in a telephone interview after his Lehman appearance.

Wyeth "will not stop" with its drugs now in development but aims to explore "other approaches to this problem until we find something that works," he said.

"If we fail, we will be a very strong company" still, he said during the Lehman meeting, due to the firm demand for Wyeth's array of vaccines and treatments for other diseases including rheumatoid arthritis. 

COULD CHANGE THE WORLD

"But we may not (fail). If we succeed, we will change the world, because Alzheimer's is an incredibly costly, burdensome and difficult problem of society. We will change the world and change the company."

Wyeth has said it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on different Alzheimer's treatments and that the size of its effort is unprecedented in the industry.

Natexis Bleichroeder analyst Corey Davis said Alzheimer's research "has been a graveyard of failed drugs, so it is not surprising that any such product in development would be deemed at high risk."

More than 5 million people in the United States have the disease, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association, up about 10 percent from the group's previous estimate in 2000.

Two of Wyeth's most promising Alzheimer's projects -- aimed at blocking production of amyloid proteins in the brain believed at the root of the degenerative disease -- are being conducted in partnership with Irish drugmaker Elan Corp.

Davis said Wyeth's "front-runner" Alzheimer's product is a humanized monoclonal antibody called bapineuzumab, or AAB-001, being developed with Elan. It attacks the so-called A-beta peptide, which is one component of amyloid plaque that builds up in the brain.

"It is a fairly extensive Phase II trial, and we could see interim data from it by mid-year," said Davis, who called the product a "completely ground-breaking approach."

"If the antibody can get into the brain and chew up plaque, it could be the first disease-modifying treatment and could be a multibillion-dollar product, but I must stress the word 'if,'" Davis said.

The other Wyeth/Elan product, now in early stage human trials, is a vaccine called ACC-001 designed to coax the body to make its own antibodies against the A-beta peptide, Davis said.

Shares of Elan and Wyeth were little changed in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange amid moderate gains for the drug sector, although Elan had fallen almost 5 percent earlier in the day and Wyeth shares had slumped more than 1 percent.