COR Therapeutics Boosted By Integrilin Data

Preliminary results of COR Therapeutics' PURSUIT trial havedemonstrated that its investigational drug Integrilin (eptifibatide) significantly reduced heart attack and death in 10,948 patients with unstable angina and non-Q-wave myocardial infarction. The data were presented at the 19th Congress of the European Society of Cardiology in Stockholm, Sweden, last week.

Integrilin, being developed in collaboration with Schering-Plough, was found to significantly reduce the incidence of death or MI from 15.7% to 14.2% within 30 days following treatment. Furthermore, Integrilin treatment was demonstrated to significantly reduce the combined endpoint of death or major MI (as measured by cardiac enzyme levels) from 8.5% to 7.3% and the incidence of non-Q-wave MI from 1.7% to 1.1% in 30 days.

The company says that the reduction in death or MI was most pronounced in the USA, Canada and Western Europe (from 14.9% to 12.7%). This subset of the trial involved over 8,500 patients. However, in other regions, no significant drug effect in the incidence of death or MI was noted.