New treatment of heart misbeats sparks Webster Labs' expansion.

Webster Laboratories Inc. is weighing alternatives to finance more than doubling production capacity and otherwise fund growth projected for the Baldwin Park company, reported Bob Evans, sales and marketing vice president.

Although Webster was rounded 23 years ago by its current president, Will Webster, the company only recently has enjoyed a "significant increase" in sales, Evans said. To keep up, he said, the company already has increased the number of employees to 100 and expanded the size of the plant where Webster manufactures electrical catheters, insulated wires used for electrophysiology procedures.

But that expansion was only prologue, Evans said, to what now is planned. Eventually, he said, the company plans to "go public when the market improves" for shares of medical device companies.

Meanwhile, Webster "seriously is considering" one of a number of a venture capital offers, Evans said. Driving the growth and venture capital investment interest apparently is a fast-growing, relatively new medical procedure to treat people with tachycardia -- when the heart unnaturally has more than 100 beats a minute.

"Webster Labs is No. I in large-tip, deflectible catheters," said Dr. Daniel Edwin Rieders, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at St. Vincent Medical Center, just west of downtown Los Angeles. There, Dr. Rieders said, he and other electrophysiologists insert Webster catheters into veins (usually on both sides of the groin and one side of the chest) of patients afflicted by fibrillation and other heart-beat malfunctions.

The physicians then snake the catheters through the veins into the patient's heart itself, Dr. Rieders said. There the electrodes on the bulbous tips of the catheters are used to "map" the interior of the heart, he explained, and pinpoint the location of the electrical short circuit(s) causing heart beat malfunction(s).

After locating the abnormal place(s), Dr. Rieders said, electrophysiologists attach the exterior end of one of the catheters to a radio-frequency source. It then generates the energy that creates a "microburn" inside the heart to ablate or remove the area of the short, he said, and cure the patient of cardiac arrhythmia.

Called "radio-frequency ablation" or "catheter ablation," the procedure is quite new, having been developed over the past three to four years, Dr. Rieders said, and has been highly successful. The success rate, he said, is greater than that of traditional surgical procedures and pharmaceuticals to prevent and to halt tachycardia attacks of up to and even more than 240 heart beats a minute.

Unless checked within an hour, such violent attacks can produce secondary congestive heart failure, cautioned Dr. Rene E. Pidoux, a prominent cardiologist in Glendale. Stroke is another possible result, he added.

Unfortunately, said Christina Heuer, a financial analyst specializing in pharmaceutical issues at New York-based Smith Barney Harris Upham & Co., "there are not many good drugs for arrhythmias." Drugs used to treat the affliction from time to time cease to be effective and also may create unpleasant side effects -- such as breathing difficulties, drowsiness and psoriasis.

Little wonder then, said Dr. Rieders, that the use of catheter ablation to cure tachycardia is "exploding." Although only 12 to 15 cardiologists presently are performing the procedure in L.A. County at perhaps a half-dozen hospitals, he estimated 500 to 750 catheter ablations will be performed this year here.

That compares to somewhat more than 4,000 procedures in the last year world wide, Dr. Rieders said.

To be sure, he allowed, there are some risks: collapse of a lung, penetration of the heart, stroke or the patient may need a pacemaker, but the risks "surprisingly are very minimal." And, Dr. Rieders said, not all tachycardias are amenable to treatment by the procedure -- most atrial (upper heart) ones are, but only a few ventricular (lower heart) tachycardias presently are.

Although this is "an exploding field of medicine," according to Dr. Rieders, it is a curious anomaly: The catheters themselves are not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration to be used to perform the microburn.

Webster's catheters, which are priced between $150 and $700 each, depending on the number of electrodes (from two to 16), are approved by the FDA for marketing for "electrophysiology studies," Evans said. That is, it's OK for "diagnostic" or "mapping" purposes, he said while declining to discuss the catheters' use to perform the curative ablation procedure within the heart.

George A. Davis, vice chairman of C.R. Bard Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., said his company is in the early stages of product development in working with the FDA for clinical trials of Bard catheters. Davis said he expected the clinical trials to start before year's end, and he hoped they will win FDA approval in 24 to 48 months for the catheters.

Nonetheless, Dr. Robert Shakman, assistant medical director of Blue Cross of California, said it approved radio-frequency ablation as a "medically appropriate procedure about a year ago for both professional and hospital services."

The procedure, which takes one to four hours or longer depending on complexities, costs about $15,000 for both hospitalization and doctors' costs, reported Dr. Rieders. The patient normally stays in the hospital overnight, he said, then returns home and "goes back to full steam the next day."