With a $14.5-million cash infusion into its treasury, Medicure Inc. now has cash on hand to last the company for the next two years.

For a small, independent company looking to develop innovative products, whose only revenue comes from appreciation of its capital investments, it is a huge boost.

"As a drug discovery company, the longer we can wait before we engage in a partnership agreement, the more valuable the company is [assuming clinical tests continue to demonstrate the effectiveness of the drugs being developed]," Derek Reimer, Medicure's chief financial officer, said in an interview.

He said that the exercise of common share purchase warrants that expired Dec. 20 (99 per cent of the eligible shares were purchased) leaves the company with about $23 million in cash in the bank at year end.

"That puts us in a very strong position, allowing us to push ahead with clinical trials of both the drugs we currently have in the pipeline," Reimer said. "We should be able to get to Phase 3 with both of them."

First results from a small Phase 2 trial on the company's second drug, MC-4232, targeted at the treatment of hypertension, are expected early this year.

Depending on the exercisable price, common share purchase warrants can sometimes bring down the share price to the detriment of shareholders who did not have warrants to exercise. In this case, the majority of the warrants were part of a share offering of two years ago and had an exercisable price of 81 cents. On Dec. 19, Medicure's shares closed at $1.50 and since then investors have bid up the stock to $1.79, where it closed Friday.

"The exercise of warrants shows real investor confidence in the company," Reimer said. "Investors want to see that the company is stable and we now have the resources to go ahead and do what we want to do without having to rely on others for financial backing."

Most small, independent drug development companies like Medicure do as much experimenting and testing on a new drug as they can afford, and at some point in the process they attempt to make a deal with a larger pharmaceutical company that has the technical and financial resources to complete the development and also has a distribution network in place to be able to successfully sell and market a new drug.

Reimer said the kind of cash Medicure now has gives it a much stronger negotiating position.

The company's lead drug, MC-1, is focused on the prevention and treatment of heart tissue damage that often occurs after a stroke and during procedures like angioplasty, or when blood flow to the heart is disrupted for surgery. The cardiovascular and stroke market is the largest pharmaceutical sector, with annual global sales of more than $70 billion US.

Medicure's other product candidate, MC-4232, is being targeted for the treatment of hypertension, a common disorder in which blood pressure remains abnormally high. About 73 per cent of the more than 50 million adult Americans who have hypertension are not adequately treated.