Heart disease R&D center set up at hospital

The center, which will be established at the Taipei VGH, will be Taiwan's first such unit working on new drugs for cardiovascular disease through cross-border cooperation, said Dr. Chiang Chern-en, who will serve as director of the center, at a news conference.

Chiang said that the number of Taiwanese people who died from heart disease in 2008 rose by 21 percent compared to the 2007 figure and that heart disease has remained one of the top 10 killers in Taiwan over the past few years.

Against this backdrop, the clinical R&D center will focus on testing new drugs aimed at treating heart conditions such as atrial fibrillation and other types of arrhythmia, which can lead to stroke or death, Chiang said.

The establishment of the center is also expected to help overcome some bottlenecks in examining new drugs, he added.

For instance,he said,fourth-stage clinical trials of Dronedarone, a new Sanofi-aventis drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year to treat patients with non-permanent atrial fibrillation, can be conducted at the center. The center is planning to recruit 500 patients for these trials, he added.

In the future, the center will also focus on diabetes, cancer and central nervous system related diseases, and will conduct better testing of new foreign-developed drugs by taking local people's risk factors into account from the initial stages, he noted.

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