Abbott Laboratories’ experimental drug-coated device used to unclog heart arteries could propel the company into a leadership position next year after a new study showed it was more effective at keeping arteries from narrowing again than the U.S. market leader, analysts said Monday.
Patients’ arteries treated with Abbott’s drug-coated stent, known as Xience, had less “renarrowing” after eight months than Boston Scientific Corp.’s Taxus device, the North Chicago-based medical products giant said in a study report released over the weekend at the American College of Cardiology annual meeting in New Orleans.
Investors were thrilled with the news. Shares of Abbott jumped more than 6 percent, or $3.38, to $57.24 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock rose as high as $57.26 a share, a 52-week high. Over the last year Abbott shares have gained more than 30 percent.
The study is considered critical for Abbott, which is expected to seek Food and Drug Administration approval for the device later this year. If approved, Xience could be on the market in the first half of 2008.
Abbott has placed a huge bet on Xience, a device considered the crown jewel of the company’s $4.1 billion purchase last year of Guidant Corp’s vascular device business. Through the deal Abbott gained a host of stents and other devices used to unclog arteries to the heart and brain, but the drug-coated stent business is considered the most lucrative.
The findings are expected to help Abbott once the company enters the $6 billion worldwide drug-coated stent market, which is dominated by Taxus and Johnson & Johnson’s Cypher. There have been small risks of blood clots in those devices, but hospitals continue to prefer the new drug-coated variety over bare metal versions.
Arteries treated with the earlier generation of bare-metal stents had the tendency to close in some patients. The drug coating is designed to inhibit the development of scar tissue and, therefore, a reclogging of the vessel.
Abbott’s sales of vascular products, including stents, was about $1 billion out of the company’s total sales of $22.5 billion. But analysts and the company expect Abbott’s blood vessel-related sales to reach $3 billion in 2009, in part because of the launch of Xience next year.
“Results from Abbott’s U.S. and European [trials] should catapult the company’s Xience product into a leadership position in both markets come 2008,” said Michael Weinstein, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase in New York, echoing the sentiment of other analysts who issued reports Monday.
Abbott’s Xience also outperformed Taxus in avoiding “major adverse cardiac events” such as heart attacks after nine months, the study showed. There was a 4.6 percent rate of such cardiac events with Xience compared with an 8.1 percent rate with Taxus.
Abbott said the “statistically significant reduction” is consistent with reduced rates that earlier European clinical trials showed.
“Across both of these trials the risk of cardiac death, heart attack or retreatment in the diseased artery area in patients was approximately two to three times lower with Xience than with Taxus,” said John Capek, senior vice president of Abbott’s vascular business.
bjapsen@tribune.com
