Statins are now, effectively, out of patent. They were the most profitable drugs in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. Lipitor/atorvastatin made tens of billion dollars in profit each and every year it was in patent, and turned Pfizer into the biggest drug company in the world. But statins are now cheap as chips.
[...]And to access that market, all you need to do is to find another way of getting cholesterol down. [Using new drugs that can be patented, and sold at a price that makes a whopping profit]. As a quick aside, the HDL ‘good’ cholesterol raising agents all crashed and burned before you ever knew they existed. They raised HDL and also raised the rate of death from heart disease at the same time. Ooops. So maybe HDL isn’t ‘good’ cholesterol after all. Shhhh, let that be our little secret. So the industry looked around, and studied everything they could, and they have come up with Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 inhibitors. However, you must ensure that you don’t ever call them that, or everyone’s eyes will simply glaze over followed rapidly by sleep. So this moniker has been shortened to PCSK9 inhibitors. Very catchy.
