Doctors Who Guided Pfizer Drug’s Research Balk at $225,000 Price

Wearing a revolutionary-era tricorn hat, doctor Mathew Maurer stood at a lectern in front of an audience of fellow cardiologists in Philadelphia, decrying the price of a new medication that had the potential to help many of his heart-failure patients.

The drug, Pfizer Inc.’s tafamidis, cost $651 a day, Maurer told them—equal to a patient’s food budget for a month. Drugs don’t work if people can’t afford to take them, he said, and the pharmaceutical company’s $225,000-a-year price was well out of bounds.

Maurer isn’t just any critic. A professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, he worked closely with Pfizer to develop the breakthrough drug. He was the lead ...