Pharma Blog Watch

HDL as a Drug Target (In the Pipeline)
In his blog, Derek Lowe discusses the recent slew of disappointing results from trials of drugs that raise HDL, including Pfizer's torcetrapib. "You'd have thought that raising HDL would be a lot more effective than this, wouldn't you?"

"This is just one more example, in what appears to be a literally endless series, of how scientific issues get more complicated the more you learn about them," he writes. "There is clearly an awful lot that we just don't understand about HDL and cardiac risk, for example. Trying to treat the varying distributions of the many different sorts of HDL particles as if they were all one unit has not been fruitful, to put it mildly …"

"Our business is already dependent to an unnerving degree on rolls of invisible dice. If anyone gets an HDL-directed therapy to work in the next few years, their success will surely have an even greater share of plain good luck in it than usual."