UBS Warburg Global Lifesciences Conference In Brief
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Angiotech Pharmaceuticals: Canadian firm will not develop another compound for use in drug-eluting stents beyond paclitaxel, but intends to replicate the stent model using the drug for other devices including peripheral stents and surgical adhesives, the company affirms Oct. 10. Angiotech claims that the physician's choice of paclitaxel versus siroliumus is more important to the company than whether Guidant and Boston Scientific are on the market with a paclitaxel stent. "The stent is secondary, and I don't think it is as important as people play it out to be," CEO William Hunter comments. The exec also suggests that equivalency trials for drug-eluting stents could be much harder to conduct in the future, claiming that it could take between 5,000 and 10,000 patients to prove a statistical difference between 4% and 5% restenosis rates. Hunter expects a federal ruling on Guidant's proposed consolidation with Cook Group for access to paclitaxel "in the next month...but I don't think it will be that clean"...