Are Injectable Cholesterol Drugs Right for You?

Well, there are many types of patients that we think about where this would be a benefit and since they lower the LDL so much, the first group of patients we think of are familial hypercholesterolemia, where people have bad cholesterols of two and three hundred. And so to get it down to something approaching normal, we’d need something as powerful as this. Other groups are patients who have known heart disease and are on high dose statins and still can’t get their cholesterol down low enough. Other patients can’t tolerate statins. They can get muscle aches or have liver problems and so that would be another potential, the statin intolerant patient. But the notion of lowering cholesterol applies to everyone. This will be, it’s a more complicated and likely more expensive than the currently available generic statin certainly. And so balancing the absolute benefit that you would see with this new therapy versus the patient’s risk of having heart problems will be something to help sort out who should get them first.