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Biotech / Medical : ICOS Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Icebrg who wrote (866)	11/24/2001 5:34:45 AM
From: Icebrg	Respond to of 1139

Financial Times on the approval of Lilly's sepsis drug Xigris. Eli Lilly wins right to offer sepsis drug By Geoff Dyer Published: November 22 2001 19:39 \| Last Updated: November 22 2001 22:24 Eli Lilly has received approval from US health regulators to market the first-ever treatment for sepsis, a potentially fatal overreaction to infections. The US pharmaceuticals company said it hoped to have Xigris in hospitals by the weekend after the Food and Drug Administration approved treatment for patients with the most serious form of the disease. Although widely expected, the news is a significant boost for the Indianapolis-based group, which issued a profits warning last month because of competition from generic copies of Prozac. Lilly, led by Sidney Taurel, has said it would hire 5,000 salespeople over the next three years to sell new treatments such as Xigris and Cialis, an erectile dysfunction drug still being reviewed by regulators. Analysts estimated that Xigris could achieve annual sales of $1bn-$2bn, making it a potential "blockbuster" medicine. Although a four-day treatment will cost $6,800 wholesale, doctors are expected to use the drug because it is the only one available, following a decade of failures by other companies. However, the eventual sales would partly depend on further tests that Lilly will undertake on children and on adults who do not have the most serious form of sepsis. Around 750,000 Americans are diagnosed every year with sepsis, when the body's immune system overreacts to an infection caused usually by another illness or surgery. This sets off a series of reactions including blood clotting which can cause organ failure. Around 30 per cent of sepsis patients die. Xigris is a genetically engineered form of a natural blood product - activated protein C - which can limit blood clotting while other drugs are used to attack infections. In a clinical trial of nearly 1,700 patients, it reduced the mortality rate of patients with a high risk of dying by 13 per cent, although it had little effect on patients who were less severely ill. Xigris received a further boost on Wednesday when Chiron announced that its sepsis treatment, Tifacogin, had failed late-stage clinical trials, prompting the California biotechnology company's share price to fall nearly 9 per cent. news.ft.com