Portola: A Cardiovascular Boutique with Big Plans

The founders of Bay Area start-up Portola Pharmaceuticals aim to leverage understanding of platelets, as well as their experiences at Cor Therapeutics and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. They intend to create an improved version of the blockbuster blood thinner Plavix. A key task for reaching that goal, they say, will be developing some new way to assay what's actually going on with platelets circulating in a patient's body at a given point in time.