It’s being described as potentially one of the biggest advances against heart failure in more than a decade.

It’s a drug made by Swiss company Novartis that hasn’t  been named yet, and is just called LCZ696.  But doctors say the experimental drug cut the chances of hospitalization or death by 20 percent in a study involving nearly 85-hundred people. 

Doctors say that if the drug receives federal approval in the U-S, it could quickly change care for more than half of the approximately 24 million people worldwide with heart failure

The drugs test results were under discussion Saturday at a cardiology conference in Barcelona, Spain, and were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

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