The results of the most widely anticipated studies to be released at the American College of Cardiology meeting this week are now public - and the results are frustratingly disappointing.

Despite raising HDL, and lowering LDL, Pfizer’s cholsterol pill raised blood pressure by 4.6 points - higher than expected - and may have worsened plaque build up in the carotid artery in the neck. And still, researchers aren’t sure why. Data won’t be available ’til December.

Phil Barter of the University of Sydney, who headed the 15,000-patient study, told an overflow crowd at the meeting that it would be the early fall before results of that trial can be fully analyzed to see what went wrong. “Nothing is being hidden,” he insists.

This does little to solve the torcetrapib riddle: Was there something unique about the pill that was responsible for the high death rate? Or is the whole class of CETP inhibitors - and the notion of raising HDL - another shooting star?

“You cannot kill the whole class just because the first drug has an unusual toxicity,” says Steve Nissen, ACC president and cardiology chief at the Cleveland Clinic, who conducted the torcetrapib ultrasound studies

But as Sanjay Kaul of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told Forbes: The HDL-boosting drugs are “not ready for prime time.” And for other drugmakers, namely Merck and Roche, that’s bad news.

ACC press release;
Abstract on coronary artherosclerosis;
Story in Forbes;
Story from Bloomberg News.[tags]Cholesterol, Merck, Pfizer, Roche, Torcetrapib[/tags]