As Pfizer Inc. swallows rival Wyeth for more than $60 billion, it's trying to clean out its pipeline. Pfizer is trying to out-license more than 100 drugs from discontinued research areas such as cardiovascular disease that for years were at the heart of Pfizer's business.

Though in the shadow of the company's steady inflow of products, these efforts serve as a gauge of Pfizer's seriousness in streamlining its massive bureaucracy, which executives are promising even as they begin trying to integrate Wyeth and its 48,000 employees.

With the combined companies promising to cut thousands of jobs, Wyeth compounds will likely get the ax, too. Pfizer is still feeling its way forward -- or as head of R&D Martin Mackay put it in an interview with industry news site In Vivo recently, "We're experimenting our way into the future."

It's a buyer's market. Plenty of experimental compounds are available as pharmas slim down and biotechs seek cash. But will buyers show up?

One early pattern has emerged. Pfizer wants not just to unload assets, but to keep a stake in them. Twice, Pfizer has spun out drugs (along with people and facilities) into venture-backed startups in which it retains equity. A third deal, recently announced, has Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline plc pooling their HIV/AIDS drugs into a joint venture that GSK mainly owns, for now.

It has named veteran executive David Rosen "head of out-licensing," a title meant to add muscle to a job traditionally at the bottom of the pecking order of Big Pharma business development.

"At the least, having an out-licensing czar gives you a path through the usual problem of navigating Big Pharma," says Joy Barton of life-sciences deal advisory firm Torreya Partners LLC in New York.

A former cat veterinarian, Rosen is trying to offload 100 compounds -- not all of which are "leads," the most promising compounds within a disease area or drug class. He's working on 50 or 60 programs, some of which have a lead and backups. (For example, there are six atherosclerosis compounds on Rosen's list.) So far, Rosen likes the idea of bundling a lead and backups for a single buyer, but he says that Pfizer must be flexible. "Any combination of up-fronts, milestones, equity and royalties is in the scope for us."

For example, Pfizer last year sold its Nagoya, Japan, lab to an investor group and handed over Japanese rights to two marketed drugs and one late-stage compound.

At least one returns more than 25% of its proceeds to Pfizer.

One priority is Fablyn, an osteoporosis drug for women that came from a research deal with Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc. of San Diego. After failing twice to get Food and Drug Administration approval, Pfizer finally got an OK from European regulators in March. But the FDA is still opposed; that reticence might keep Fablyn on Pfizer's shelf.

Though Big Pharma prefers to buy, spinouts aren't unprecedented. In 2001 Swedish giant Pharmacia Corp., which Pfizer bought in 2003, spun out its metabolic disease research group into BioVitrum AB in Sweden. San Francisco-based Alta Partners was an early investor, and it has come back for more.

In 2008 it was one of three main venture firms in the $22 million Series A round for Esperion Therapeutics Inc., which spun out of Pfizer's shuttered Ann Arbor, Mich., facilities. The CEO is Roger Newton, one of the scientists responsible for Lipitor at Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. before Pfizer acquired it in 2000. Newton left Pfizer after that acquisition, started an earlier iteration of Esperion and sold it to Pfizer for $1.3 billion in 2004.

Pfizer got to its current size, about 82,000 employees and $48 billion in annual sales, through M&A. After it bought Warner-Lambert, it picked up Pharmacia and has kept up a steady stream of lower-level buyouts and licensing deals since. In early 2006, then-CEO Hank McKinnell Jr. called 2005 the "last year of the old Pfizer" and promised $4 billion in annual cost cuts through 2008. McKinnell retired early a few months later and Jeff Kindler, promoted from general counsel, replaced him. During the transition, Pfizer sold its consumer products line to Johnson & Johnson for $16.6 billion, a deal Kindler has hinted was an error.

Early in his tenure, Kindler dismissed the idea of another big deal, but, as predicted, Pfizer went back to the well for Wyeth.

The Esperion deal took 50 weeks to finish. Alison de Bord of Alta Partners says Pfizer moved slowly because it was complicated and was the first spinout of Pfizer's new era. Pfizer kept a stake; neither side will discuss terms. Part of the reason Pfizer is willing to liberate Newton, his team and a preclinical candidate to help the body break down fat, is a bit mundane: The write-off lets Pfizer save $426 million in taxes.

To get buyers to bite, minimal up-front payments help them save cash for clinical work. Including insiders such as Newton is also attractive. "It's more enticing than the pharma saying, 'Take this compound and do something with it,'" says de Bord. "Roger knows cholesterol. He knew where the data was, he knew about clinical trials, he knew a couple things even Pfizer didn't know."

De Bord warns against big pharma demanding buyback rights for successful compounds. Another no-no: Pulling assets off the table after months of discussions can waste precious time and resources of smaller buyers. So perhaps most of all, potential buyers are watching Pfizer and other Big Pharmas' willingness to let go.

After all, no matter how important the title, and no matter how empowered, no one wants to be the guy who sold a future blockbuster for peanuts.