Shaking up the cholesterol game

A small biotech got a boost to its hopes of disrupting the cholesterol-lowering market — long dominated by pharma’s biggest players. Esperion Therapeutics announced that a combination of its once-a-day drug, bempadoic acid, lowered LDL cholesterol by 18 percent when combined with statins — compared with a standard statin regimen alone.

The company plans on submitting its data to the FDA for approval early next year. It’ll likely be priced at $3,500 — lower than the $14,000 list price of PCSK9 drugs, which are out of reach for some patients but are generally the most effective at lowering cholesterol if statins fail to do the job. Esperion’s drug is meant to be an interloper, of sorts, squeezing somewhere between the costly, effective PCSK9 drugs and the economical, but less potent, statins.

Read more.