A New Generation of Drugs Could Lower Heart Attack Risk for Millions

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0:33A new class of drugs could help millions of people lower their risk of heart attacks if the companies can show the medicine actually works. Let's say that the drugs actually do help translate to better cardiovascular outcomes. They also have to show that they have a meaningful benefit. Plus, Ford's stock is popping for a reason that has nothing to do with cars. And Iran's battered economy is proving a key factor in peace negotiations with the U.S. The Navy is gone. The Air Force is gone. Everything's gone. And they're negotiating on fumes. It's Wednesday, May 27th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal.

1:10This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Tens of millions of Americans have elevated levels of lipoprotein A, a fatty particle in the blood. It's a variant of LDL, the bad cholesterol, and a driver of heart disease. Scientists have been chasing treatments for decades with little to show for it. Now a new class of drugs has potential. They're currently in trials, and if the drugs work, the companies could be on the verge of the next big market for heart drugs. It's valued at as much as$25 billion a year. Journal reporter Xavier Martinez joins me now with more.

1:49Xavier, lipoprotein A, or LPA, has been difficult to treat for a long time. Diet and exercise don't really help because it's genetic. and other heart drugs like statins can actually raise LPA. What's different about these new drugs? This new generation of drugs that are currently in late stage trials, they use genetic technology to almost silence the gene that tells the body to produce LPA. So the short version is your liver produces LPA based on genetic instructions, right? These drugs intercept that signal before the liver can act on it. and they tell the liver to stop making so much of the particle.

2:30You mentioned that these drugs are in trials right now. How promising are they looking and what still needs to happen before they can go in front of the FDA for approval? The first phase three or latest stage trial by Novartis is expected to read out anywhere between, you know, in the next couple of weeks to the next couple of months. And there's two companies that are producing drugs that are going to follow this Novartis trial, and those are Amgen and Lilly. The Amgen trial is going to read out hopefully in the next year or two, while Eli Lilly's trial will read out in 2029 is what it's expected.

3:07I should also say Lilly is working on a pill version of this drug, and that's expected to be even easier to take up among patients. They don't have to do the injection for people who are afraid of needles or who think that might be too much of a hassle, And that would follow in the 2030s. Just to be clear on one point here, we know that higher levels of LPA are linked to heart disease. But it's not totally clear yet that a drug that then lowers those levels of LPA will help cut the risk of heart disease. Is that right? That's true. Modeling has sort of indicated that that is likely the case. But again, there's been many historical examples of drugs that really, really worked on paper and then just didn't turn out to be quite as effective, you know, in the human body.

3:52And so part of this is that, OK, let's say that the drugs actually do help translate to better cardiovascular outcomes. They also have to show that they have a meaningful benefit, right? A 5 % relative reduction in the risk of stroke or heart attack for a lot of analysts, at least, is just not enough. So 13 to 20 percent would be considered a hit in the industry in terms of insurers covering it and doctors prescribing it. And, of course, the FDA approving the drug. That was WSJ reporter Xavier Martinez. Thanks, Xavier. Thanks so much.

4:27Lululemon is making peace with its founder, Chip Wilson. Wilson is a big shareholder, owning 8.7 percent of Lululemon shares. And he's criticized the leggings company for years, arguing that it's no longer cool and has given up its lead to new arrivals. For example, last October on CNBC's Squawk Box, he said that the board was too focused on hitting Wall Street's numbers. And it hires people that can deliver specific quarterly numbers. And those people are generally very good and everything, but they're not creative. And they tend to use algorithms to buy and sell what's sold the year before. So basically, innovation stops.

5:08In December, he launched a proxy fight seeking to overhaul the company's board. Now, Lululemon and Wilson have reached a deal. Wilson will get to name two new directors to the company's board, Plus, the company will add another director with product and brand expertise in apparel. And Wilson? He's agreed to not badmouth Lululemon for 18 months. Its stock closed 2.9 % higher. Also higher today, Ford's stock price. It's risen about 30 % in the past two weeks, hitting its highest level since August 2022. But the reason doesn't have much to do with cars or trucks. The company recently announced a new energy storage subsidiary called Ford Energy.

5:46Ryan Felton, who covers the automotive industry for the journal, says investors are excited because it's an opportunity to capitalize on the AI boom. They had built these factories for making batteries intended for electric vehicles. As the EV market took a downturn, they've moved to repurpose that capacity to make batteries for powering artificial intelligence, data centers, power utilities, large industrial customers, and the like. And there's a massive need for this sort of product at the moment. And many other competitors like Tesla, LG Energy, they're working on similar products to meet that sort of need.

6:31And there's just this big opportunity. There's a lot of upside. That was WSJ reporter Ryan Felton. Oil futures closed at their lowest level in more than a month today. Investors hope that the latest U.S.-Iran talks will lead to a deal to end the conflict. U.S. crude futures dropped 5.5 percent to under$89 a barrel. In stocks, the tech rally slowed down, though the three major U.S. indexes all edged higher. They closed at new records. Coming up, why do tickets to this summer's World Cup cost an arm and a leg? Two state attorneys general intend to find out. That's after the break. The real challenge of AI isn't the pilot.

7:15It's what happens when organizations try to scale it across the enterprise and things start to break. In a new episode of Tech Fluential, Cisco's Liz Santoni and former Humana CIO and Capital One executive Sam Deshpande explore why AI needs a total redesign of how work gets done. They share how to move from experiment to transformation and build a culture that's ready for the challenge. Where technology and influence converge, new opportunities can emerge. That's Tech Fluential, a podcast from Deloitte and custom content from WSJ.

7:48Turning to the war with Iran, during a cabinet meeting today at the White House, President Trump said that the country was miscalculating if they hoped he would back down to avoid a long conflict. Their money has no value. Their whole economic system is broken down. They thought they were going to outweigh me, you know. We'll outweigh him. He's got the midterms. I don't care about the midterms. Look what happened last night. What happened last night was, as we mentioned on this morning's show, Texas yesterday held a runoff election for the midterms. Trump's pick for Senate, the state's Attorney General Ken Paxton, trounced incumbent Senator John Cornyn to win the Republican nomination.

8:23Trump also had another message for Iran. He's ready to keep negotiating, but he's not excluding more military action. And in Iran, the economy is in bad shape. That's proving to be a critical factor in how both Iran and the U.S. are coming to the table to negotiate the war's end. I'm joined now by WSJ Middle East correspondent Benoit Foucault. Benoit, the U.S. blockade was meant to put pressure on the Iranian regime. Is it having its intended effect? It did work. What is really paradoxical is that during the war where you basically had Iran receiving massive bombings, That period actually was not as damaging for the Iranian economy because oil exports continued almost unchanged.

9:07The U.S. blockade on Iran ports is a very different story. It really started to damage the Iranian economy in a much deeper way. Everything that Iranians buy, especially imported goods, are much more expensive. Rice prices, Iranian officials tell me, you know, have increased by either 100 percent to 200 percent, depending on the categories, because of the U.S. blockade. And Iranian officials are urging people to conserve fuel, electricity and water, while more than a million Iranians have been left out of work. That's all going on while the U.S. and Iran are negotiating for a more lasting peace deal as opposed to the current temporary ceasefire.

9:41Where does that leave both the U.S. and Iran in those discussions? Iran is even more under pressure to find economic relief. They're not getting any substantial oil revenue. So you do have a situation where it's more pressing now for Iran to get a deal that starts with the end of the U.S. blockade, but potentially that also starts with commitments to get billions of dollars blocked abroad released to Iran. On the other hand, they obviously assume that the U.S. have to find an understanding because the longer the homeless blockade lasts, the more oil prices and the economic pain is going to increase for Western consumers.

10:18It's an issue for both sides. Iran is running out of storage. They're going to have to shut up some of their production. But also the same for a lot of producers in the Persian Gulf. So like the storage face-off is a key trigger for both sides to agree. That was WSJ Middle East correspondent Benoit Foucan. Thanks, Benoit. Thank you. Elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel has killed Hamas' new military chief, Mohamed Odeh. Israel's defense minister said Odeh helped plan the October 7, 2023 attack. The killing came less than two weeks after Israel killed Odeh's predecessor. While there's a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel is carrying out a campaign to kill or capture anyone involved in October 7th.

10:59Hamas confirmed Odeh's death, saying he was killed along with his wife and two of his children by an Israeli strike on a residential building. And finally, soccer fans looking to score tickets to the upcoming World Cup may have found those seats to be quite expensive, often in the thousands of dollars, and much higher than the prices for games in previous World Cups. We know that FIFA, soccer's governing body, is using demand-driven dynamic ticket pricing, but the process has been opaque. FIFA has released tickets in batches on its website, giving the impression of scarcity. Well, the attorneys general for New York and New Jersey said, show us those receipts.

11:38Today, they issued subpoenas to FIFA to compel the organization to disclose just how it arrived at those prices. The investigation will also look at other FIFA ticketing practices after fans reported being misled about seat locations and ticket categories. FIFA officials declined to comment. And that's what's news for this Wednesday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Tali Arbel. I'm Alex Oseleff of The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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