“Even if the company isn’t ready to give up on Effient, we are,”

Eli Lilly had billion-dollar hopes when the blood thinner Effient was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last summer.

But Lilly’s latest financial report shows the product — its first new drug in four years — is having trouble catching on.

After sales of $22 million in its first quarter on the market, sales in the subsequent quarter fell to $3.8 million, hardly portending a blockbuster, and analysts slashed their projections.

The faltering start of a new drug in a $6 billion market may also hold broader lessons for the nation’s pharmaceutical industry. Some analysts say it shows that the big drug companies need to grow more from mergers and acquisitions than from research and development.

The disappointment raises pressure on Lilly, one of the world’s top 12 drug makers, to seek deals or an outright merger, as many of its rivals have done, to gain economies of scale and new products. Lilly, based in Indianapolis, has promoted homegrown innovation, but has found it a costly and risky strategy.

“Even if the company isn’t ready to give up on Effient, we are,” Jami Rubin, a Goldman Sachs analyst, wrote in a note to investors, cutting her 2015 estimates for the drug to $414 million, from $1.1 billion.

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