Doctors say an innovative new drug can prevent heart attacks and strokes by cutting bad cholesterol to unprecedented levels.
The injection cuts cholesterol to the lowest levels ever seen in medicine in an international trial.
The BBC reports that over 27,000 patients were trialled with the new drug — evolocumab — which changes the way the liver works to also cut bad cholesterol.
Heart attacks and strokes, caused mainly by bad cholesterol, lead to 15 million deaths year — the largest killer in the world.
Bad cholesterol is the villain in heart world – it leads to blood vessels furring up, becoming easy to block which fatally starves the heart or brain of oxygen.
People with high amounts of bad cholesterol are currently with statin.
“It is much more effective than statins,” Peter Sever, a professor from Imperial College London, told the BBC website.
He organised the bit of the trial taking place in the UK with funding from the drug company Amgen.
Sever said: “The end result was cholesterol levels came down and down and down and we’ve seen cholesterol levels lower than we have ever seen before in the practice of medicine.”
The patients in the trial were already taking statins and yet their risk was cut further by the new therapy.
He added: “They would have another 20% reduction in risk and that is a big effect. It is probably the most important trial result of a cholesterol lowering drug in over 20 years.”
The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and also reported at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology.
The study showed that one heart attack or stroke was prevented for every 74 patients taking the drug in the two-year trial.
It is too soon to know if the drug is saving lives.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Evolocumab is an antibody just like the weapons used by the immune system to fight infection.
However, it has been designed to target a protein in the liver with the name PCSK9.
And ultimately it makes the organ better at whipping bad cholesterol out of the blood and breaking it down.
Other trials have shown such antibodies have cut bad cholesterol levels by 60% and Amgen is not the only company looking at this approach.
The antibody is given by injection into the skin every two to four weeks.
