After Exubera, Uncertainty Reigns

Long before Pfizer's(PFE Quote) decision to stop selling Exubera, Wall Street was already having second thoughts about inhaled insulin.

Now, with Exubera's failure, analysts are sharpening their focus on competing products, none of which are expected to reach the market until 2009 or 2010 at the earliest.

The brightest spotlight is on companies with experimental products in late-stage clinical trials. Do they keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the belief that they can do a better job than Pfizer, which just took a $2.8 billion pretax charge to drop inhaled insulin? ...