Cholesteryl ester transfer protein

But we'll go to some of the more modern work, the statins, which everybody's enamored with, the wonder drugs, which reduce LDL by blocking the HMG-CoA reductase enzyme.

But we also have perhaps one of the best kept secrets in all the cardiovascular research, and that is there's another category of drugs that's been studied extensively over the past couple of decades, and they're called CETP inhibitors.

And what they do is interfere with the conversion of HDL into LDL, therefore increasing your levels of HDL, that's the good cholesterol, and dramatically decreasing LDL.

It's actually better than statins.

the CETP inhibitors, and chances are almost nobody in this room has heard of the CETP inhibitors.

The reason why I haven't heard about them is they've completely failed.

And so I'm showing you this news report rather than showing you every single study.

Tens of thousands of people have been given the CETP inhibitors.

The statin target pointed the same direction.

The conclusion in their words, "Genetic lowering of non-HDL cholesterol via HMGCR or NPC1L1 and CETP reduces the risk of dementia." So this is not complete or absolute proof that the pill cuts your dementia risk.

Just be careful here.

It basically measures a lifelong genetic effect, not a few years on a tablet that you can take.

I'm not actually sure if that's in our model as stated in that fashion.

Uh, some influence on CETP obviously, but maybe it wasn't a- adequately stated there.

Yeah.

Uh, and to be fair, that's a, that's a dif- there are different levels of confidence for different parts of the hypothesis.

Mm-hmm

... and then narrowing in, and then getting my blood work right at a certain time, and I think I could get to that.

But as you know, there, we, we have an entire class of drugs that have now been effectively pulled with CETP inhibitors.

Mm-hmm.

You can ask genetics that question.

You can say, if you modulate the gene in question CETP, is it likely to cause hypertension? Now, an informal look at the genetics is a bit confusing because there are genetic variants near the gene which do increase rates of hypertension.

But when you do a proper analysis, and our platform and indeed our agentic system can do this, it shows that actually it's not that gene, it's a nearby gene which was related to hypertension.

So had they done those analyses, executives at Roche would have at least been rather confident that they wouldn't have the same side effect profile as the Pfizer drug did.