New Heart Disease Drug in Phase 2 testing.
Citing initial results from a Phase 2 trial for the once-daily drug in patients with cardiovascular risk factors and obesity, the California-based biopharma said VTX3232 was safe and well-tolerated among study subjects.
The 12-week study evaluated VTX3232’s safety and tolerability as its primary goal, and the company measured the drug’s effect on high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) as the trial’s secondary goal related to inflammation.
As for hsCRP levels in the full analysis, there was a 64% reduction in the biomarker from baseline among patients treated with VTX3232 compared to a 3% rise in the placebo group.
“These results support further development and VTX3232’s potential to address the high burden of disease caused by inflammation,” said Ventyx’s (NASDAQ:VTYX) medical chief, Mark Forman.
http://seekingalpha.com/news/4507405-ventyx-up-mid-stage-trial-data-heart-drug
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See also Inflammation now predicts heart disease better than cholesterol | Empirical Health
The American College of Cardiology just released recommendations that change that. The ACC is now recommending that everyone measure inflammation (specifically, hs-CRP) via a blood test
hs-CRP is actually a stronger predictor of cardiovascular events than LDL.
Why? In some ways, cholesterol has become a victim of its own success. We now screen the whole population for high cholesterol, give statins to those with high LDL (or ApoB), and so then the majority of people who end up having heart attacks have lower cholesterol than they would naturally have. This means most of the majority of residual risk for heart attacks will be found in biomarkers that aren’t SMuRFs.
Inflammation (hs-CRP) is one such non-SMuRF, perhaps one of the strongest. This is especially true for people already on statins or those without traditional risk factors (sometimes called “SMuRF-less” patients). In these groups, cholesterol may be well controlled, but inflammation remains a key driver of events.
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