Nortran's potential blockbuster heart drug Message Board

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Biotech / Medical : Nortran's potential blockbuster heart drug

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To: Chuca Marsh who wrote (17)	1/7/1997 5:43:00 PM
From: Ron Kertesz	of 27

Hi Charles, You did indeed key in on a major highlight of our work. Those graphs do tell the story of our drugs and are what gets people excited about Nortran's antiarrhythmics. Basically, the green line is the good effect. The more drug you give, the more protection you get against arrhythmias. Eventually you reach 100% protection, i.e. complete suppression of arrhythmias. The red lines are two toxic effects. One is a measure of effects on undamaged heart muscle (by measuring effects on various electrical parameters in healthy heart muscle) and the other is decrease in blood pressure (this one gets confusing since more effect means lower blood pressure) which is good if a person has hypertension and you lower their pressure 10 or 15% but bad if you lower blood pressure by 50% or more. If you look at the chart for existing antiarrhythmic drugs you can see that as you increase protection you also increase toxic effects. There is no separation between good and bad effects and therfore a small therapeutic window (the difference between the doses you can give to get a good effect and the dose that causes serious side effects). What this means in practice is that you cannot give enough drug to achieve 100% protection against arrhythmias without killing the patient. In fact it is difficult to achieve even a 50% protection without severe, and potentially lethal, side effects. Compare this to a the chart for Nortran drugs. We can achieve 100% protection against arrhythmias with little or no toxicity. This gives us a wide therapeutic window. These graphs come from real data in our labs and are not just some representation for illustrative purposes. Now you can see where our excitement originates. We have, as far as we know, the first potential chronic use drug to prevent sudden cardiac death in high risk individuals. There are about 1.5 million heart attacks every year (with many more people at risk) in North America and about 500,000 deaths due to heart attack. This is the single biggest killer in the developed world. Heart attack kills as many people as all forms of cancer. AIDS doesn't even come close (about 42,000 deaths in 1994) and the new AIDS drugs are now reducing this figure. The potential markets are huge and our preclinical data has us very excited. I hope this answers some questions. More information can be had at our web site or email me with specific questions.. The URL for the graphs I was refering to is nortran.com Regards, Ron

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