Johns Hopkins Medicine
Media Relations and Public Affairs
CONTACT:  Joann Rodgers
PHONE:  410-955-8659
E-MAIL:  jrodgers@jhmi.edu
March 23, 2006

Statement regarding PolyHeme
 
Contrary to a statement made as part of a press release by Northfield Laboratories of Evanston, Ill, on Feb. 22, 2006, a Johns Hopkins Medicine faculty member, Edward Norris, M.D., is not presenting information about a clinical trial of the company’s blood substitute PolyHeme at the annual meeting of the Network for the Advancement of Transfusion Alternatives (NATA) in April 2006; was not given access to full study results from Northfield; and does not and cannot substantiate Northfield’s claim that PolyHeme was unlikely to have been the cause of 10 heart attacks and 2 deaths in patients receiving the blood substitute as part of a clinical trial that ended in 2000.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has asked Northfield to retract its February 22 release and to reissue a corrected version.

The company’s release challenged a Wall Street Journal article that questions the Acute Normovolemic Hemodilution (ANH) multi-center clinical trial, begun in the late 1990s.

Dr. Norris was among those who participated in the clinical trial.