Brian Farmer, director of corporate development for NovaCardia Inc., says his company finds an interesting drug and builds a team around it. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

The American Heart Association reports one in three adults has some form of cardiovascular disease. Since 1900, with the exception of 1918, this disease annually has been the No. 1 killer in the United States. Nearly 2,500 Americans die of cardiovascular disease each day, an average of one every 35 seconds. Heart disease claims more lives each year than the next four leading causes of death combined: cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, accidents, and diabetes mellitus. If all forms of CVD were eliminated, life expectancy would rise by almost seven years.

Annual expenditures for heart failure approach $25.8 billion. The Heart Association reports that heart attack strikes some 865,000 Americans each year and 550,000 new cases are reported annually. In 2003, an estimated 7 million inpatient CVD operations and procedures were performed in the United States.

Doing their part to fight the disease are San Diego research and development companies. One is NovaCardia Inc. “We are a very, very small pharmaceutical company,” says Brian Farmer, director of corporate development. “We find an interesting drug and build a team around it.” NovaCardia is a 3-year-old private firm that buys drugs from big pharmas midway through clinical trials and takes them to market. In the works is KW-3902, indicated for congestive heart failure. The drug was purchased from a Japanese company developing it for oncology reasons. Rendered obsolete by a new cancer drug, KW-3902 was sold.

KW-3902 successfully completed Phase II trials and proven that it protects the kidneys during treatment for heart failure. It will shortly begin Phase III trials. NovaCardia also is in the process of bringing in additional products to treat other cardiovascular ailments.

“We’re not Pfizer or Merck, that’s for sure,” Farmer says. “But that’s why it’s so exciting (to be so close to receiving FDA approval). Phase II is an important stage; that’s where you get an idea if the drug will work or not. That’s a big pivotal point. Then stage three, especially for a small company to have a drug in a market as big as heart failure.”

San Diego is known for its biotech companies, many of them in the early stages of pharmaceutical testing. Farmer says this isn’t the sort of work NovaCardia is after: “It takes so long to get it to market.”

Joining The Fight Early

Ken Buechler, president, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Biosite Inc., says patients will have better outcomes and lives will be saved by more accurate and rapid diagnosis.

Fighting against heart disease at the onset is Biosite Inc., a diagnostic company that specializes in the rapid diagnosis of life-threatening conditions. “We believe patients will have better outcomes and lives will be saved by more accurate and rapid diagnosis,” says Ken Buechler, president, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Biosite. “If a diagnosis is accurate and rapid, a patient can be treated more quickly. And it seems somewhat obvious that if the patient is treated more quickly, they will have a better outcome.”

Biosite has developed a meter, an instrument the size of a telephone, that measures multiple proteins simultaneously in the blood or urine to determine if the patient has had a heart attack or to determine what stage of heart disease the patient is in. “What this allows us to do much better than our competition is cover a wider range of the etiology of the disease as well as follow how the disease changes with time and changes with severity,” Buechler says.

As for the competition, Buechler says there are other diagnostic companies in San Diego but they don’t specifically work on these types of tests that provide results quickly to emergency physicians for these life-threatening diseases. More quickly disposing of patients from the emergency department, coming to a quicker conclusion or answer as to what the patient has, would help reduce crowding in the ER.