New_Zealand_Listener_09_14_2019

SEPTEMBER 14 2019 LISTENER 17

with chronic coughs and has been found

to be highly effective in clinical trials – but

those trials excluded patients with hyper-

tension. The drug, originally developed by

Roche, is now owned by Merck. Paton says it

has taken more than three years of negotia-

tion with the company to get it to agree to

a clinical trial of the drug in sleep apnoea,

which has no drug treatments. If that trial

shows anti-hypertensive activity, it might

be sufficiently attractive to take to market.

“Big pharma is all about finding drugs that

can hit markets that don’t already have

treatments, or have only a few drugs. And

currently, anti-hypertensives are cheap – we

haven’t had a new one in about 18 years.”

The Auckland study will recruit at least

30 hypertensive patients who’ll be tested to

measure their sympathetic nervous system

activity. Microneurographer James Fisher

will insert very fine acupuncture needles

into the perineal nerve on the side of the

knee – it’s close to the skin and contains

many of the sympathetic system fibres the

scientists are targeting – to measure the elec-

trical impulses and their pattern of activity.

Paton says although they already know

hypertensive people have “massive” activ-

ity compared with those with normal blood

pressure, the work will produce results for

the ethnicities common in the New Zea-

land population, which often aren’t found

in European studies.

TURNING UP THE HOSE

Discovering why Māori and Pacific people

have disproportionately high levels of cardi-

ovascular disease will be one of the key aims

of Manaaki Mānawa, the new Centre for

Heart Research (see story on page 21) based

at the University of Auckland’s medical

school. It will be launched in February and

will bring together the work of 110 clinical

and discovery scientists in Auckland, and a

further 90 from around the country. It’s the

first step in a bid to establish a $50 million

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Measuring sympathetic
nervous-system activity:
microneurographer James
Fisher and Professor Julian
Paton; below, Fisher fits
a finger cuff to measure
arterial blood pressure.