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8:07 am, February 9, 2010
AstraZeneca wins new market for heart disease drug

US regulators have given AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN) the go ahead to promote its anti-cholesterol drug Crestor to older men and women.

The drug, which prevents heart disease, can now be prescribed for men at least 50 years old or women at least 60 even if they have healthy cholesterol, the US Food and Drug Administration said.

This opens up a new market because such patients have not usually been given anti-cholesterol drugs.

Crestor, which had global sales of $4.5bn in 2009, will now be prescribed to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, bypass operations and artery-clearing procedures in people with healthy cholesterol but high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and at least one other risk factor.

It follows a study called Jupiter in which AstraZeneca took data from 18,000 patients.

Howard Hutchinson, chief medical officer at AstraZeneca, which employs nearly 7,000 people at Macclesfield and Alderley Park in Cheshire, said: "Not only is this approval a significant milestone for AstraZeneca, but it is also important for the patients who could now benefit from Crestor therapy under this approved indication. This new indication adds to the significant body of evidence physicians use to evaluate Crestor as a treatment option."

Comments?manchesternews@crain.com

One Response

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1. Paul
   February 11, 2010 04:52 pm

   The Framingham study evidence underlying the “lipid hypothesis” was never strong to start with. Since then a massive lipid lowering campaign has shown no effect on heart disease rates. While an elegant and seemingly intuitive hypothesis, more and more openly people are rightly questioning the wisdom of the cholesterol lowering campaign.Cholesterol is an essential component of every cell membrane and important for myriad physiologic functions. When Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD PhD looked at the medical literature he found something quite surprising had been documented there. On average people with higher cholesterol live longer. Cholesterol is a mediator in heart disease but blood cholesterol levels have next to no effect on heart disease rates again heart disease rates mostly unchanged since the advent of the massive cholesterol lowering campaign. Here is something else to consider, as any chemist will tell you, cholesterol is a single molecule. How then are there "good" and "bad" cholesterol molecules. It is at best scientifically imprecise and at worst a crass marketing ploy to talk about the levels of high and low denisty lipoprotein (say it again lipoprotein i.e. a protein - they are carrier proteins) as implying different cholesterol molecules. Then again the statin cholesterol lowering drug class alone is a 30 billion dollar a year industry. This latest attempt to expand cholesterol lowering "medication" to healthy individuals with normal cholesterol is both absurd and offensive. http://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/

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