The quick “magic bullet” jab offers new hope to patients who fail to control their soaring cholesterol levels despite taking wonder drugs such as statins.
More than four million people in Britain take statins daily to lower cholesterol and cut their risk of heart attacks and strokes.
The drugs, used for more than 30 years, are credited with saving thousands of lives by slashing harmful blood fat, reducing furring-up of arteries which trigger heart attacks and cutting risk of an attack by a quarter.
But around one in four do not manage to reduce their cholesterol to a safe level. This is either because the statins do not work properly, patients cut their dose or stop taking them altogether due to terrible side effects.
Now scientists have created a potent jab that can dramatically slash blood levels of the “bad” LDL cholesterol while significantly increasing levels of the “good” HDL cholesterol.
Risk of heart disease is particularly high in those with a high level of LDL cholesterol and a low level of HDL.
According to the first preliminary human tests, the medicine in this new jab has been shown to lower the LDL in healthy volunteers on the highest dose by an average 64 per cent more than those on an inactive placebo injection.
The injected treatment, called AMG145, is a “monoclonal” antibody, a laboratory-made human protein that targets a recently-identified cholesterol regulator. Monoclonal antibodies are already used to treat certain cancers as they use the body’s own immune system to kill tumour cells.
The study, presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions, involved 54 men and two women, aged between 18 and 45, who were healthy and not on other medications.
In the study, scientists created AMG145 to “turn off” a cholesterol regulator which interferes with the liver’s ability to remove bad cholesterol from the blood.
Participants received a single injection that contained one of five levels of doses of AMG145 or a placebo.
Sixteen received the injections intravenously. The others had simple injections that delivered the drug just beneath the skin.
After the injections, bad cholesterol was measured frequently for 85 to 113 days, along with other laboratory measures related to heart disease. With increasing doses of AMG145, blood tests revealed lower levels of bad cholesterol, total cholesterol and apolipoprotein-B, which “delivers” bad cholesterol to the tissue, causing fatty deposits to clog the arteries.
Dr Clapton Dias, lead researcher and medical sciences director of clinical pharmacology and early development at Amgen, Inc., in California, said: “It appears to be a promising way to lower bad cholesterol.
“With higher doses, bad cholesterol stayed lower for a longer period.”
The injections were well tolerated and volunteers receiving AMG145 experienced no more side effects than those on the placebo.
The company is now conducting a similar study that gives multiple doses of AMG145 to adults who take statins to control their cholesterol.
If AMG145 proves safe and effective in further clinical trials, it could help people unable to control their cholesterol with current medications that work in different ways.