From
The New York Times:
Leading drug makers are competing to reach the market with a new class of pills to prevent the kind of dangerous blood clots in the veins and lungs that can travel to the brain, causing strokes.
The standard treatment for people with atrial fibrillation is warfarin, a powerful 60-year-old drug that originated as a rat poison. Warfarin, a generic drug also sold under the brand name Coumadin, is highly effective but it has drawbacks.
The medical and financial potential of warfarin alternatives has been one of the hot topics this week at an international cardiology conference in Stockholm attended by thousands of heart specialists. On Tuesday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting, researchers were scheduled to present the results of pivotal studies on two such drugs: apixaban, under development by Bristol-Myers Squibb together with Pfizer; and rivaroxaban, also known under the trade name Xarelto, a collaboration between Bayer Healthcare and Johnson & Johnson.
A third contestant in the
anticoagulant race is dabigatran also known by the brand name Pradaxa, from Boehringer Ingelheim, a German drug company.