New Treatment for Lp(a) Bad Cholesterol

Podcast Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Love Your Heart, brought to you by Cleveland Clinic's Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute. These podcasts will help you learn more about your heart, thoracic and vascular systems, ways to stay healthy and information about diseases and treatment options. Enjoy.

Steven Nissen, MD:

I'm Dr. Steven Nissen, and I'm going to talk with you for a little bit about a new therapy for treating a disorder that is common. About 20% of the world population have elevations of a lipid particle, a cholesterol particle known as lipoprotein(a), or lipoprotein little a. It's associated with a very big increased risk of heart attack, stroke and other types of disorders that involve buildup of plaque in arteries. It has been an untreatable disorder for many, many years. We have had no therapies approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating this problem. We are now on the verge of therapies that will help patients that have this.

Now, one important thing to know is that it is more prevalent, that is higher levels, in Black patients than in white patients, so developing therapies is particularly important for Black or African-American origin patients. What I'm reporting on is a therapy that's quite interesting. It involves an injection given relatively infrequently, every 16 or 24 weeks. This drug is called Zerlasiran, and it's a small snippet of RNA that is taken up by the liver. And in the liver, it degrades messenger RNA that is responsible for the formation of lipoprotein(a) particles.

In the study that I'm reporting, we saw about an 80% to 85% reduction in blood levels of lipoprotein(a). That's a very big reduction, and what we're talking about is reduction over the entire time of treatment. So a single injection would produce an 80 to 85% reduction over the next 16 to 24 weeks. We're very encouraged. Zerlasiran is one of several therapies being developed, some of which are going to complete their clinical trials within the next couple of years. And so here, after so many decades of being unable to treat this cholesterol type disorder, we are now on the verge of important new therapies. We've really looked forward to this era when we have innovative new approaches to medicines that can benefit patients that have these disorders. To give you an idea of how common this disorder is, there are 64 million people in America that have elevated lipoprotein(a), and there are 1.4 billion people on our planet that have this disorder. We hope we can bring new medicines to them soon.

Announcer:

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