Prep­ping a case for canakinum­ab, No­var­tis tries to stake out a high-val­ue seg­ment of huge car­dio mar­ket

No­var­tis prob­a­bly al­ready has the da­ta it needs for a reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval of its big car­dio drug canakinum­ab. Now it says it has the da­ta in hand for a big piece of the mar­ket that pay­ers won’t be able to turn their noses up at.

Us­ing a sim­ple bio­mark­er test, No­var­tis’ $NVS de­vel­op­ment chief, and soon CEO, Vas Narasimhan says that the drug proved more clear­ly im­pact­ful for heart at­tack pa­tients whose hsCRP lev­el — a mea­sure of in­flam­ma­tion us­ing high-sen­si­tiv­i­ty C-re­ac­tive pro­tein — fell be­low 2mg/L af­ter three months of treat­ment. By that score, they tracked a 31% re­duc­tion in car­dio­vas­cu­lar death and a 31% re­duc­tion in all-cause mor­tal­i­ty.

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