The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7478 p556
17 November 2007

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Tezosentan fails to improve acute heart failure survival

Treatment with tezosentan, an experimental medicine for acute heart failure, has failed to show improvements in symptoms or survival in a 1,435-patient trial programme.

The study of the intravenous short-acting endothelin receptor antagonist, published last week in JAMA (2007;298:2009), revealed no difference in shortness of breath between patients treated with tezosentan on admission to hospital with acute heart failure and those given placebo.

The incidence of death or worsening heart failure at seven days was no different between the two groups.

“The potential beneficial effect on breathlessness of reducing pulmonary capillary wedge pressure with tezosentan may have been offset by another, detrimental, action of endothelin blockade, for example, induction of pulmonary venous-arterial shunting leading to desaturation,” the study authors propose.