Statin substitutes go beyond drawing board
New cholesterol-lowering drugs help people who can’t take the usual ones
By Nathan Seppa
LOS ANGELES — People who can’t take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may someday have an alternative drug option that works about as well. Three new studies show that antibodies developed to target specific proteins in cells can knock down LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, at a rate comparable to the highly successful statins, which go by brand names including Lipitor and Crestor.
The experimental drugs take a unique biological approach to clearing LDL from the blood, suggesting that they might replace statins in people who cannot abide those drugs’ side effects, particularly muscle pain. The new drugs may even work in conjunction with statins in people who inherit extremely high cholesterol.
Called biological products or “biologics” because they are made in living cells, the new drugs may fill a niche currently vexing doctors. “We have been bumping up against statin intolerance in patients,” often in people who have had a heart attack, said Peter Wilson, an endocrinologist at Emory University and the Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center in Atlanta. Wilson, who wasn’t part of these studies, estimates that 5 to 15 percent of people who need statins can’t take them. “We now have biologics to treat this hyper-cholesterolemia, and they’re effective.”
The new drugs, including AMG-145 and RN-316, are still in the testing stage. But researchers offered tantalizing early results November 5 at a meeting of the American Heart Association. Cardiologist Evan Stein of the Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center in Cincinnati reported that people with very high LDL who got AMG-145 injections every four weeks experienced a 41 to 51 percent drop in LDL scores by 12 weeks, depending on the dose. That study was also released online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.