It looks like a drug from Pfizer called Torcetrapib raises HDL cholesterol substantially, even when combined with statin drugs which lower overall cholesterol levels.

A quick lesson: what we generically call "cholesterol" generally includes high-density lipoproteins (HDL) and low-density lipoproteins (LDL). (There's also triglycerides and such, but let's not get into that for now).

An important thing to understand is that your body needs cholesterol. It's crucial to healing injuries, for example. However, excess low-density lipoprotein (abbreviated LDL) is associated with sclerotic pulmonary arteries--basically, the arteries leading up to your heart get clogged up with plaque made up of cholesterol and fat. Current theory holds that HDL cholesterol will sort of "scour" the plaque off the arteries.

This, by the way, is why they tend to call LDL "bad" cholesterol and HDL "good" cholesterol. I always cringe when I hear that, because the truth is that LDL is not bad. Without it you'd die. It's just that too much of it is deadly in the long run.

Thus the fight with cholesterol has always been a little weird: if you lower all cholesterol, you're lowering the LDL that causes plaque buildup, but also lowering the HDL that helps clean the plaque up. The ideal has long been to find a way to raise HDL while reducing LDL, but the common drugs to lower cholesterol tends to reduce both. While studies are showing that the cholesterol-reducing drugs do reduce death by heart disease, most doctors suspect that if you could both lower LDL and boost HDL you'd probably have a far more effective treatment, since you'd be both reducing plaque buildup and increasing the cleanup of the plaque that's there.

I hope that all made sense.

Anyway, that's why the discovery of this new treatment protocol is interesting. If you can take two drugs, one to lower LDL and the other to raise HDL, it should be possible to prevent and, more importantly, substantially reduce the most common form of heart disease.

Of course, the actual use of this therapy may be many years away, especially given the glacial pace that the FDA forces onto medical research. But I have a strong suspicion that within a decade dual-drug treatments like this will be common.