By Lisa Seachrist

Washington Editor

Denver-based Myogen Inc. raised $18 million in a private placement with institutional inventors to help develop therapeutics for heart disease.

The 16-employee company raised the money primarily with funds from a new investor, New Enterprise Associates, of Menlo Park, Calif. All of the company¿s founding investors ¿ Sequel Venture Partners, Crosspoint Venture Partners and InterWest Partners ¿ as well as two new firms, New Venture Partners and CMEA Ventures, also joined in the financing.

Privately held Myogen will use the funds, combined with $6 million raised in its initial financing in October 1998, to initiate a pivotal Phase III study of its oral heart failure drug, enoximone, sometime in the first quarter of 2000.

¿Our financing success has largely been driven by Sequel Ventures, one of the only venture capital firms in Denver,¿ said President and CEO William Freytag. ¿They believed in us.¿

Freytag described the near-virtual company¿s business plan as supporting innovative research into heart failure and heart disease as well as in-licensing late-stage clinical products. In fact, the company in-licensed its lead product, enoximone, from Hoechst Marion Roussel in late 1998.

¿We¿re still pretty much a virtual company,¿ Freytag said. ¿Our business profile is to rapidly build a company with a product pipeline in both the near and far term.¿

Enoximone is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor type III. By inhibiting the destruction of cyclic AMP in heart muscle cells, the drug concomitantly increases the force of contraction of the heart while dilating blood vessels. The dual action takes the load off of the failing heart.

Patients with heart failure have a decreasing ability to pump an adequate blood supply. As a result, they can suffer decompensation events where fluids accumulate in the lungs and the patient ends up in the hospital. Patients in late-stage heart failure end up hospitalized two to three times a year as a result of decompensation events.

In Europe, enoximone is approved as an IV therapy to increase the contractility of the heart following a decompensation event. Myogen is prepared to test an oral form of the drug in combination with beta blockers to see if the combination can decrease the number of hospitalizations each year. The study will involve 50 centers and 1,300 patients. That trial will be conducted largely with the help of a contract research organization.

¿Pretty much, our job with this trial is to design it and provide the financing,¿ Freytag said.

In addition to enoximone, Myogen will be conducting more basic research to elucidate the molecular events that lead to heart failure.

¿We, of course, hope to be able to identify therapies to slow down or reverse the progress of heart failure,¿ Freytag said. ¿We¿ve identified a couple of targets that we can look at. That is all being aided by extensive heart tissue bank that we have obtained through our affiliation with a number of heart transplantation programs.¿

The company¿s research platform is based in a large part on its association with Michael Bristow, head of cardiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who serves as chief scientific and medical officer for Myogen. Bristow established the role of beta blockers in extending the lives of patients suffering from heart failure.

While pursuing basic research avenues, Myogen¿s management will continue to look for opportunities to in-license later-stage products. The company is currently considering ¿four or five opportunities¿ as well as keeping the door open to collaborations with big pharma, Freytag said.