A new paper was published on these findings and MedCo filed for a new patent for the drug as a treatment for heart failure specifically in black patients.The new patent and the old patent were then licensed to a company called NitroMed, which ran a clinical called the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT), the results of which were published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The clinical trial was stopped early because the drug showed significant benefit; it reduced mortality by 43%, reduced hospitalizations by 39%, and improved quality of life markers in African-American patients with CHF.On the basis of A-HeFT, the FDA approved BiDil in June 2005. In 2006, the Heart Failure Society of America included the use of the fixed dose combination of isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine as the standard of care in the treatment of heart failure in blacks. : e44

Society and culture
Controversy
The new drug application claiming treatment of a single, self-identified racial group raised a storm of controversy.
Hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate, sold under the brand name Bidil, is a fixed-dose combination medication used to treat self-identified Black people with congestive heart failure. It is a combination of hydralazine hydrochloride (an arteriolar vasodilator) and isosorbide dinitrate (a nitrate vasodilator).The American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this race-specific medication to treat congestive heart failure in specifically self-identified Black patients. It provoked controversy as the first drug approved by the FDA marketed for a single racial-ethnic group. History
From 1980 to 1985, Dr. Jay Cohn of the University of Minnesota  led a clinical trial in collaboration with the US Veterans Administration called the Vasodilator-Heart Failure Trial (V-HeFT I) that tested whether the combination of isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine increased survival in patients with heart failure. The results were promising and a follow up study, V-HeFT II, tested the novel combination against enalapril. Cohn applied for a patent on the combination treatment, which was issued in 1989 as US Patent 4868179. Cohn then licensed the patent to Medco Pharmaceuticals who went on to prepare a New Drug Application (NDA) to approve BiDil on the basis of the V-HeFT trials.The V-HeFT data was re-analyzed and found that the drug combination appeared to be more effective in treating self-identified African-Americans. This was a significant finding due to prior studies which showed that African-Americans with congestive heart failure (CHF) appeared to respond less effectively to conventional CHF treatments (particularly ACE inhibitors) than White Americans.