Biotech Values

[iwfal]

“It’s potentially a game-changer,” Steve Nissen, a high-profile cardiologist who is often skeptical of the drug industry, told Forbes. “There could be a much larger population of patients that may benefit than are currently treated.”

He forgot the counter part to this - that there is a very significant possibility that a large population of patients taking statins get little benefit. (Somewhat speculation on my part - based upon combining two factoids: a. the likelihood of much larger efficacy seen in Jupiter than in elevated ldl trials, and b. a large fraction of patients with elevated ldl in PROVE-IT etc have significantly elevated crp.)

I'd expect that someone crunches number on Jupiter to figure that out - but of course it will take a decade+ to get hard data from another trial. And whoever tries to run such a trial is going to have a darn hard time finding money - it won't come from big pharma, and it won't come from academia (since so much of academia has swallowed 'statins-work-via-ldl' as ABSOLUTE (in a recent Science article it was clear that there is complete disagreement in cardiology about anything other than ldl - and that most scientists talk their book).