MedEvidence! Truth Behind the Data

Cholesterol Breakthroughs From the AHA Meeting in New Orleans

• Dr. Michael Koren, Kevin Geddings • Episode 352

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Dr. Koren joins Kevin Geddings to report live from the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans with fresh results on LDL lowering, prevention, and the future of gene editing for cholesterol. They discuss the excitement of big meetings like the AHA and how results can even surprise the investigators that were working on a study.

Note: Dr. Koren refers to CRISPR Therapeutics, a company developing gene-based cholesterol lowering technologies. CRISPR-Cas9 is also the general name of a gene editing technique.

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Have a question for Dr. Koren? Email him at askDrKoren@MedEvidence.com

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Music: Storyblocks - Corporate Inspired

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Announcer:

Welcome to the MedEvidence Monday Minute Radio Show, hosted by Kevin Geddings of WSOS St. Augustine Radio and powered by ENCORE Research Group. Each Monday morning, Dr. Michael Koren calls in to bring you the latest medical updates and insightful discusions. MedEvidence is where we help you navigate the real truth behind medical research with Both a clinical and research perspective. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn about the truth behind the data of medicine and healthcare. This is MedEvidence!

Kevin Geddings:

Joining me live on the studio line, Dr. Michael Koren, medical doctor, cardiologist, research scientist, and we enjoy our time with him typically on Monday mornings around this time. And today, calling in live from the American Heart Association meeting going on in New Orleans. Dr. Koren, good morning.

Dr. Michael Koren:

Good morning, Kevin. How are you?

Kevin Geddings:

Well, doing well, doing well. I've already seen some news, big media headlines coming out of the meeting that you're there. But what what are you, you know, what's your sort of takeaway of some of the big headlines coming from that meeting?

Dr. Michael Koren:

It's been a very exciting meeting, in fact. And just for those people who aren't familiar with this concept, we have big medical conferences typically where the results of clinical trials are shared with the entire community of physicians from around the world. So it's a really exciting event for all of us. And this year the focus has been these tremendous results on the cholesterol front. And when I say cholesterol, these are all things that have to do with blood fats, including LDL cholesterol, which uh people usually understand as quote the bad cholesterol, a form of what we call a lipoprotein, which is a combination of fats and proteins that causes all kinds of problems when it's at high levels in patients who are at risk for heart disease. So this uh particular conference was exciting because it was a study that we were very involved with, including a lot of patients in Northeast Florida and St. Augustine. And this study was called the Vesalius study. And the results show that using a drug called Repatha resulted in much better outcomes for people who have not had a previous heart attack or stroke, but were at risk for those problems. So this drug actually prevented the development of those problems over the course of four and a half years. So that was a really, really big result, and everybody was talking about it. So if you're a patient in St. Augustine that was part of the trial and your ears are ringing, it's because we were talking about you here in New Orleans.

Kevin Geddings:

That's exciting. But a great illustration, right, Dr. Koren, of when you get to participate in these studies right there at the Whetstone Building in St. Augustine, you know, you're basically at the leading edge of, you know, a global effort to make us a little bit healthier, right?

Dr. Michael Koren:

Absolutely. This is how we learn. We like to say in MedEvidence that there's stuff that we know is stuff we don't know, and there's a process by which we learn things. And in this particular case, people who were at intermediate risk of having a heart attack or stroke may not have felt completely comfortable getting very aggressive at lowering their cholesterol. And now we know, in fact, they should. They should be speaking with their physicians or getting involved in future clinical research and getting that LGL cholesterol down as low as possible.

Kevin Geddings:

Yeah. That's Dr. Michael Koren once again. One of the headlines I saw on coming from your study or from the event that you're at in New Orleans, the American Heart Association event, Dr. Koren, has to do with a shot that we could take that will be like a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing that could reduce our bad cholesterol for decades.

Dr. Michael Koren:

Yeah, yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up. So these are now the latest in gene therapy. People may have heard this, they may have heard of a company called CRISPR. And these are now therapies that will actually change the genes in your liver to prevent the actual cause of certain cholesterol problems. So if anybody's listening to us and is interested in these things, please let me know because it's coming to a clinical trial site near you in the very near future. And these things were discussed at the American Heart Association meeting. So a really a whole new frontier in the way we treat things. And keep in mind uh CRISPR is a company that helped develop a cure for sickle cell anemia. You may have remembered that from a couple of years ago. That these ways of changing the genetics of certain people are now coming to a clinic, a research clinic near you. And uh we're super excited to be part of this. And if people are interested in learning more about it and have a severe problem with cholesterol or triglycerides, let us know and we can tell you what's going on the latest and greatest about how this might be something that's a solution at some point in the near future.

Kevin Geddings:

Right. I was wondering when you're at these conferences and you know, the latest in clinical research is being shared, is this uh on occasion, is it the first time you've ever heard of things, or are there other forms of communication where doctors and research scientists like you kind of already know what's going to happen?

Dr. Michael Koren:

Well, there's a lot of things that I hear about for the first time. So I mentioned the Vesalius study. Because I was an investigator in that study, I'm very well aware of what's going on. But even for us, we are blinded during the course of the study, so we do not know the results until we come to these meetings. And there's a big reveal here, and it's really exciting, and everybody's high fiving each other, and we're getting r really pumped up about it. But there are things that are obscured that I may not know about at all. So that's fun. Sometimes I'll just spend a couple hours of the meeting picking a a random classroom and jumping in and see if there's something new that I can learn about. So for example, this year there's a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy where your heart gets really thick and um sometimes it works in a way where it gets in its own way. It starts blocking blood flow. And I saw this really pretty crazy surgery that was developed in China where they can make a little incision in your heart and shave away the part of the heart that's thick and getting in its own way.

Kevin Geddings:

Wow.

Dr. Michael Koren:

So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's something I hadn't seen before, so that was fun. So just one of the examples of the many things that gets presented here at the American Heart Association meeting.

Kevin Geddings:

Well, we appreciate you, Dr. Koren, calling in from New Orleans to update us on what is going on at the American Heart Association meeting, and very excited to that some you know results of trials that you were involved with right here in St. Augustine uh were talked about at that meeting. Once again, you can learn more by going to EncoreDocs.com. And a lot of this information we talk about, the information that Dr. Koren just referenced, that's the sort of you know reliable, believable, trustworthy information you're going to find on a very special website called medevidence.com, right, Dr. Koren?

Dr. Michael Koren:

Absolutely. And interestingly, a lot of people at the American Heart Association meeting were very interested in Med Evidence! So I literally spent half of my time here explaining it, showing it to people, and um hopefully getting more and more eyeballs to look at this concept of presenting medical information through podcasts and slide presentations and other things where doctors are talking to each other in a very credible way. So they're just trying to sell you something. We're trying to analyze it for you, help you understand what we know, what we don't know, and how we learn about the stuff that we don't know. So people seem to love the format, and I was pretty excited. I got pumped up. I'm having many conversations about MedEvidence here at the American Heart Association meeting. Yeah. So check it out, medevidence.com.

Kevin Geddings:

Well, the reach of Med Evidence just continues to grow exponentially, and we're we're proud to be a part of that as well. Go to medevidence.com, the truth behind the data. It's a great resource for information. Don't just rely on Google or Snapchat or Instagram. You know, go to a source you can trust and share that too with other people who are researching various health topics. Have them check out medevidence.com, medevidence.com. Dr. Michael Koren, uh, hope you have a good time in New Orleans. Safe travels back home, okay?

Dr. Michael Koren:

All right. Well, uh, thank you, Kevin. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you next week.

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Dr. Michael Koren

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