While Cleveland foresees the possible benefits of using the drug on heart attack patients, they're leaving ischemia off the table, Fonstein says, so they can concentrate on their main targets. After all, Cleveland expects ARS to be a $500 million market, with interested buyers including nuclear power companies, militarily threatened countries like Israel and our own Department of Defense, which has already partly financed the drug's development with a $8.9 million grant in 2008. (On Tuesday, Cleveland announced it was applying to the DoD's recent Request for Proposal for drugs to protect against radiation exposure.)

"We may come back to [ischemia] very soon," Fonstein says. [But] look at biotech over the last year, everyone had to stay focused, conserve resources and focus on the lowest hanging fruit."

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