Novartis Corporation Conference Call - VALIANT Study Results on Diovan - Part 1.

(From Fair Disclosure Wire)

OPERATOR: Good afternoon. This is the conference call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Novartis Valiant results on Diovan conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may seek an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. The call will be handled by Dr. James Shannon, Global Head of Clinical Development and Medical Research, accompanied by Mr. Kurt Graves, Chief Marketing Officer and Dr. Karen Huebscher, Global Head of Investor Relations. I would like now to turn the conference over to Dr. Huebscher. Please go ahead, madam. KAREN HUEBSCHER, GLOBAL HEAD OF INVESTOR RELATIONS, NOVARTIS AG: Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us on this conference call on Valiant. As you know we've got James Shannon and Kurt Graves on our conference call. James will run through the presentation before we go into a short Q&A. I expect the conference call to last until about 6:00 p.m. our time and 1:00 p.m. U.S. time, for a 7:00 p.m. time and 1:00 p.m. U.S time.

Before we start the conference call, I need to read the Safe Harbor statement. The information presented in this conference call contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other facts that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements, expressed or implied by such statements. Please refer to the company's Form 20-F on file with the SEC for a description of some of these factors. And now I would like to hand over to James Shannon. James, may I ask you to go through the presentation?

JAMES SHANNON, GLOBAL HEAD OF CLINICAL DEVELOPMENT AND MEDICAL RESEARCH, NOVARTIS AG: Karen, thank you very much. It is a great pleasure for me to be here at the American Heart Association today to report the results of the Valiant study which were released this morning and then presented in the plenary session by Professor [LOSS OF AUDIO] in Boston. The agenda today, I want to run very quickly through the key results of the Valiant study, the first MI results, but as you see in slide two, I also wants to put the Valiant data a little bit into context as to how we see the standard of care implications for the hypertensive class and in particular for Diovan. And with regard in specifics to blood pressure efficacy, cardiovascular and vascular protection, tolerability and then compliance and persistence.

If you move to slide three, Valiant as designed -- has been a landmark study. It is the largest-ever study which has been conducted in the treatment of post-MI individuals. The study started in December 1998 and rolled through patients through June of -- of 2001 and was intended to be a comparison of Diovan as a single agent versus the well-established gold standard in this class which is Captopril and then the combination of the two agents combined to see if there was additional benefit in combining [INAUDIBLE] in the patient population.

We chose Captopril because it had been the first and best studied of the ace inhibitors and in particular had been the first studieded in the first 24 hours following myocardial infarction when patients are at greatest risk and we did study Valiant, the onset of the drug's action, starting from 12 hours forward, so it was important to have a drug which was well studied during that environment. As I mentioned, it is the most rigorous post-MI study ever conducted. We targeted 14 1/2 thousand but ended the trial with 14,703 patients, coming from 24 countries across the world.