Saturday, August 29, 2009  Cholesterol, never mind LCAT, try
ACAT  Just a quickie. More from the killing fields.  Those poor
folks with heterozygous FH are such a playground for
cardiologists. My latest accidental find was ACAT inhibition
using pactimibe. Medscape describes it this way:  "Pactimibe was
in development as an ACAT1 inhibitor, intended to make available
more free cholesterol for reverse cholesterol transport, which
theoretically could reduce lipid accumulation within
atherosclerotic lesions."  Oh, this link works in Safari but not
Firefox... Not worth reading, the quote is all you need anyway!
OK, stop foam cell generation and ship out the evil cholesterol
(maybe using enhanced LCAT? That'll be next) to HDL for reverse
transport. CAPTIVATE-ing idea. I think they were a bit unlucky
with this one.  Combined endpoint was deaths, heart attacks and
strokes. One out of 438 on placebo, 10 out of 443 on treatment.
That's a relative risk of errr, umm... arithmetic fails me.  My
biggest worry about drugs