Wyeth's (NYSE:WYE) head of pharmaceutical research Mikael Dolsten has already accepted a job at Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE), which is buying his company for $68 billion, but at an industry conference in San Francisco on Wednesday he barely mentioned his new boss as he touted several drugs in Wyeth's pipeline.

In fact, in a 45-minute presentation that went into the clinical data for pipeline candidates for Alzheimer's, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, Dolsten wouldn't have mentioned Pfizer at all if the subject of divestiture hadn't come up in a post-speech Q&A.

The question made perfect sense. Pfizer this year began an aggressive outlicensing campaign for dozens of compounds it wants to clear from its portfolio.

And after all, Wednesday's conference is dedicated to licensing and partnering. Might Dolsten be giving potential buyers a sales pitch on drugs in Wyeth's outbox? Dolsten declined to comment on the Pfizer deal except to say, "You can't predict the future," and that in general, a company's pipeline is like "a mirror" of its management's priorities. When two companies combine, "there may be some projects valued more highly, and some less so. That's standard."

He said the compounds he showcased Wednesday could serve just as easily as examples of innovative programs or technologies Wyeth wants to in-license or collaborate on in the future. One example: new types of antibody-like structures that can be built in discrete modules, like predesigned Legos that snap onto one another.

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