Biotech Values

[biomaven0]

they tested SNPs that are associated with elevated HDL-C plasma level and not a spesific HDL subtype. Their data implies that raising HDL-C plasma level alone is not going to be clinically useful.

By chance today at a tea party I met someone who turned out to be a well known lipid biologist whose specialty is HDL. He pointed out that the genes they looked at in this study were all selected based also on the fact that they had no impact on LDL levels. Given the synthesis of LDL and HDL are related, this choice might be significant and might be a possible explanation for this result.

I also learned that the same exercise for LDL was uniformly positive - gene variants that raised LDL led to increased heart disease and variants that led to low LDL reduced disease. That shook my previous conviction that statins were acting mostly as some sort of anti-inflammatory drug and their impact on LDL was mostly incidental.

Peter