Merck makes good on big CV gamble with vericiguat nod — but competition will be fierce
The results for Merck’s leading heart drug fell short of what some cardiologists had hoped for, but they proved more than enough to convince the FDA, which handed down an approval Wednesday.
The agency OK’d vericiguat, now marketed as Verquvo, for patients with heart failure, offering one of the first new pharmaceutical tools to tackle a hard-to-treat group of patients at high risk for what remains the leading cause of death in the US and Europe. It’s also a notable win for Merck, who rolled the dice on the molecule in 2016, paying Bayer $1 billion for US rights to the then-experimental drug and ex-US rights for the approved CV drug Adempas.
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