Pfizer is briefing Wall Street and the news media on big job cuts next week. Possible savings: an additional $800 million to $2 billion annually beyond the $4 billion in cuts announced already.

The Wall Street Journal, among other news outlets, reports that an upcoming speech by Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler will herald significant change above and beyond the ongoing reorg. (That alone was expected to cost a fifth of the U.S. sales force their jobs.) Up to 30 percent of European sales operatives will be fired and unspecified Pfizer “facilities” will be closed.

We are a bit unclear, we must confess, on how closing manufacturing factories will solve the company’s R&D productivity issue, but perhaps that will be explained next week.

Spending on research at Pfizer will be held steady, several articles say. The fundamental issue remains. No major, mid-sized or small life science company really knows how large its R&D effort should be. The short-term neurosis of the economy at large makes it difficult to say whether present R&D investment levels in pharma and biotech companies will prepare them for future growth—or are unsustainable remnants of a bygone era of prosperity.

Getting back to the WSJ, Kindler has shown the door to two top Pfizer executives, the paper notes:

“Recently he replaced Sylvia Montero, a longtime employee who had been head of human resources and a member of the newly appointed executive team, with Mary McLeod, from Korn Consulting, who will act as interim head of human resources. People familiar with the situation say Mr. Kindler is tapping Korn to help him rework the company’s culture and aid in its transformation. Another departure was Declan Doogan, world-wide head of drug development, who left last month. Pfizer confirmed both the changes.”

Doogan’s official bio contains no surprises. He joined Pfizer as part of the 2003 Pharmacia acquisition. Before that, however, Doogan had worked for Pfizer as long ago as 1982, running the development of Zoloft and the company’s research organization in Japan.

When it comes to Wall Street people trying to make sense of all this, we are sympathetic—okay, that’s probably too strong. Let’s just say that there are mega-challenges in understanding a pipeline like Pfizer’s. It would give most mortals a migraine to gauge whether anything coming out of Pfizer’s labs will be big enough to replace Lipitor (facing generic competition as early as 2010), much less the recently canceled torcetrapib.

Over at CNNMoney, meanwhile, another story notes that Lipitor isn’t the only patent expiration issue. Pfizer revenues for 2006, according to the collective wisdom of Wall Street, will fall 6 percent.

“In addition, the company’s patent expires in 2007 on the blood pressure treatment Norvasc, which totaled $4.7 billion in 2005 sales, and the allergy drug Zyrtec, with 2005 sales of $1.3 billion. Pfizer won’t be able to count on these drugs as billion-dollar blockbusters for much longer.”