Investors see value in drugs

By SIMON COLLINS

The partly Auckland-based Medicines Company has raised US$250 million ($518 million) in the United States to market drugs for blocked arteries and high blood pressure.

The 6-year-old company has headquarters in New Jersey but its six-person Auckland team, led by managing director Dr John Villiger, directs its clinical trials.

Villiger told a UBS Warburg biotechnology conference in Auckland yesterday that the company had raised US$250 million, including US$96 million from a float on New York's Nasdaq exchange in August last year.

Its first product, a drug called angiomax, which helps to clear blocked arteries, had net revenue of US$24 million in the first nine months of this year.

Villiger said a large-scale trial on 6000 US angioplasty patients, which had just been completed, showed angiomax was more effective than its established rival, heparin.

Full results from the trial will be presented at the American Heart Association conference in Chicago on November 17.

"A dose of heparin is US$1000. Angiomax is US$300," he said.

Villiger, originally from the Waikato, ran a drug development group for Roche Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland before joining The Medicines Company when it was founded by Dr Clive Meanwell in the United States.

"I was going to move there, but for family reasons I wanted to come back here. We kept working together," he said.

The six people who now work out of the company's offices in the Hewlett-Packard building on Princes Wharf make up a fifth of the company's 30 clinical development staff. Total staff, including sales, number 160.

The company aims to pick up drugs that have been through initial trials and take them through the final stages to commercialisation.

Villiger's team is now running clinical trials on its second drug, clevidipine, which is believed to lower blood pressure.

The UBS Warburg conference was the second of what is planned as an annual series. Other presenters included Auckland Uniservices, Blis Technologies, Genesis Research and Development, ViaLactia, Neuronz, Celentis, Biodiscovery and Dunedin's Quest Venture Capital.

The Medicines Company