- The Medicines Co $MDCO held its 2q2011 earnings conference call 7/27/11 (no transcript found yet on Seeking Alpha or Morningstar so listened to webcast replay)
- MDCO recently licensed a Captisol-enabled IV formulation of clopidogrel (Plavix) for atherosclerosis from Ligand (see more details on LGND research page).
- Below are my notes:
- "8 development programs all focused on acute/intensive care medicine" - but no update on clopidogrel during r&d summary
- Spent a lot of time in past yr on outcomes-driven innovation...dissect what innovation opportunities there are in chest pain pathway, cath lab, and cardiac surgery
- Opportunity: minimize uncertainty around timing of loading P2Y12 inhibitors...15% of cath lab pts can't have oral therapy (due to shock, intubated, or poor gastric motility/absorption)
- Outside US, IV aspirin is used in 30% of pts..but not because it works that well
- IV plavix: gives improved certainty of dosing, may offer improved speed on onset (haven't done head to head trial vs oral plavix)
- "Shout out" for Cydex team, very excited about partnership, think we can move forward very quickly
- very important: offset is not an issue, risk of ischemia is moderate to high. 40% platelet inhibition is adequate
- if approved and "value priced", could be very important add-on to high volume PCI center, US, Europe, India, China (massive need for treatments that work quickly on pts who come in naive to therapy)
- Cangrelor - those pts where 80% platelet inhibition needed, want to be able to reverse quickly
- different scenario and price points, think we'll sell a lot of both drugs, will become dominant IV antiplatelet drugs in the world
- FDA may not require head to head plavix study, but think it would be valuable and "not a heavy lift" for us to do them