High hopes for new cholesterol drug to reduce risk of heart attacks

A new way of treating cholesterol, developed in Melbourne, could help reduce the risk of heart attack and strokes in almost one in five Australians.

Transcript

00:00 Cardiologists here at the Victorian Heart Hospital are calling this treatment a real

00:06 game changer.

00:07 And we don't normally like to bandy about carelessly the word breakthrough when it comes

00:12 to medical stories, but researchers do say that this is a world first treatment and it's

00:16 the first time that you can ever take a tablet to treat high levels of the bad cholesterol

00:22 known as LP(a).

00:25 The head of the hospital here, Professor Stephen Nichols, says that LP(a) is actually the evil

00:33 cousin of the much more well-known cholesterol LDL.

00:37 And he says it affects about 20% of the population.

00:41 It's also genetic, meaning that no matter what sort of exercise or good diet you might

00:46 have and what doctors do to treat your cholesterol or your high blood pressure or even your diabetes,

00:52 you're still at much higher risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke because it's very difficult

00:58 to reduce the levels of LP(a) in your body.

01:03 And at the moment there is no effective treatment.

01:05 It has been known about LP(a) for nearly 60 years now.

01:10 However, it's been difficult to work out the sorts of levels and now they have much more

01:16 widespread genetic testing.

01:18 They're also easily able to do blood tests as well and the sort of quality of those blood

01:24 tests has improved as well to be able to find this.

01:28 But the treatment previously has just been injections, which most people wouldn't really

01:32 want to tolerate.

01:34 So this is the first time they've got a tablet which is called Muvalaplan.

01:39 And they've had early trials of Muvalaplan showing that it actually can lower levels

01:45 of LP(a) in your body by up to 65%.

01:50 That's also really important because LP(a) is much more sticky than LDL cholesterol,

01:55 so it's got much more chances of clogging up your arteries as well.

02:00 And Professor Nichols is now over in Amsterdam presenting this early research to a cardiology

02:07 conference where he's talking about the fact that these early trials have shown that people

02:12 have really been able to tolerate Muvalaplan, this new treatment, really well.

02:17 So he is looking forward to doing much larger scale global clinical trials.

02:23 And if they are successful, we could be seeing Muvalaplan being widely available for patients

02:29 not just here in Australia but also abroad within about five years.

02:32 So it's certainly going to be quite a game changer when it comes to reducing the risk

02:37 of heart disease and stroke.

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