A phase II clinical trial showed the effectiveness of firibastat for people with high blood pressure. This treatment belongs to a new class of antihypertensive treatments.
Nearly 14 million French people currently suffer from high blood pressure (HTA). This chronic disease is the most common in France. It refers to abnormally high blood pressure in the blood vessels. At first glance, high blood pressure seems innocuous because it is silent. However, when it is not controlled, it becomes one of the main causes of complications, in particular with the risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
Often people with high blood pressure follow a diet and are prescribed medication. Only for some patients this is not enough. To remedy this, new treatments are being tested. This is the case with firibastat, the effectiveness of which has been demonstrated in a study published in the Journal of Hypertension.
A third clinical trial
Firibastat is part of a new class of treatments, which target the cerebral renin-angiotensin system. It blocks all the mechanisms causing arterial hypertension, by inhibiting aminopeptidase A, an enzyme present in our brain and which produces angiotensin III. Firibastat has already been tested in two phase I clinical studies.
34 patients participated in the study conducted by researchers at theNational Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm). The participants were on average 57 years old, 73% were men and none hadt problem of being overweight. Half of them received firibastat for four weeks, then a placebo for another four weeks. The other half received the placebo first, then the firibastat.
The more severe the hypertension, the more effective the treatment.
According to the results, firibastat led to better control of systolic blood pressure (SBP) after four weeks, with a drop of -4.7 mmHg against +0.1 mmHg on placebo. This difference does not seem significant. “This can be explained by the small size of the workforce but also by the fact that the patients included had moderate arterial hypertension”, explains Catherine Llorens-Cortes, director of research at Inserm.
However, firibastat is an antihypertensive agent and not a hypotensive. That is to say, it acts only on hypertension, not on normal tension. “Its effectiveness should therefore increase with the severity of the hypertension”, specifies the researcher. This is also confirmed in the study since a drop in blood pressure reached -9.4 mmHg in the event of high hypertension. These results gave the green light to a phase IIb study conducted in the United States, which also shows the effectiveness of firibastat, this time on overweight hypertensive patients.
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