The Lp(a) Race Without a Ticker on the List
Porter Stansberry’s Ignition Point pitch is built around gene silencing for lipoprotein(a), the cholesterol-adjacent particle known as Lp(a). The pitch names five picks, and Amgen (AMGN) is not one of them. That omission is the interesting part, because Amgen runs one of the most advanced Lp(a) drug programs in late-stage development.
Lp(a) is genetically determined. Your level is set before you can do much about it, and statins plus diet barely move the number. A high reading quietly raises the risk of heart attack and stroke over decades. That is the entire reason drugmakers have spent years trying to silence the gene that makes it.
Amgen’s Drug Is Not Porter’s Pick
The drug in question is olpasiran. It sits in Amgen’s pipeline as a late-stage candidate designed to lower Lp(a), and it is not among Porter’s five Ignition Point names. Olpasiran enters the story through a side door instead. The RNAi technology behind it came from Arrowhead, the company Porter casts as the “Challenger” pick. Arrowhead licensed its platform to Amgen for the program, then made a telling decision.
Rather than hold the royalty, Arrowhead sold its olpasiran royalty interest to Royalty Pharma for $250 million. We break down that deal in our Royalty Pharma piece. The upshot for Amgen is simple: it is the company that has to actually finish the trials and run the outcomes study, not the one collecting a passive royalty.
The Pelacarsen Reality Check
The Ignition Point teardown surfaces a fact that should temper any Lp(a) story. On September 4, 2026, Novartis reported that its Lp(a) drug pelacarsen failed its cardiovascular endpoint. The drug lowered the Lp(a) biomarker, but it did not cut the rate of heart attacks, strokes, or other events in the trial.
Novartis is the “Ballast” pick in Porter’s pitch, and the failure matters for the whole class. A lower biomarker reading is not the same as a better outcome. Olpasiran has to clear the exact same bar, and Amgen is running that experiment right now. The result will carry more weight than any single headline about a big reduction in Lp(a) levels.
The Royalty Versus the Trial
Porter frames his barbell as a pair of tollbooth names providing ballast alongside speculative drug developers. The tollbooth logic is the same theme he lays out in his broader Royalty Riches teardown. Amgen sits on the other side of that divide: a full-fledged drugmaker bearing trial risk, not a royalty collector insulated from it.
That distinction is why the Ignition Point pitch skips Amgen. Porter wants the ballast of royalty streams and the swing of first-in-class developers, and Amgen is neither. It is a large, diversified pharma company where olpasiran is one program among many.
What It Means for Amgen Stock
Amgen is not a single-bet company. Its base business is large and steady, so olpasiran is a portion of the story, not the whole thing. But the Lp(a) race is one of the more closely watched parts of its pipeline, and the Novartis miss raised the bar for every drug chasing the same target.
Investors who want to follow the gene-silencing theme without guessing a trial outcome can watch the royalty aggregators, and we cover the antisense side of the same story in our Ionis Pharmaceuticals piece. Amgen, by contrast, is a direct bet on the science itself.
The Prize and the Second Wave
Porter wraps the Ignition Point thesis in a “second wave of AI” argument. The first wave, by his telling, was the chip and software boom. The second is what happens when that computing power turns toward biology, speeding up the search for the right RNA targets and the design of gene-silencing drugs. It is a loose connection, but it sits on top of a real prize.
Lp(a) is common, and it is inherited, so it barely responds to statins or diet. A drug that lowers Lp(a) and actually prevents heart attacks and strokes would reach a population no current therapy can fix. That is why Amgen, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and others are all funding programs against the same target at once. The label on the pitch is marketing; the economics underneath are a race to be the first Lp(a) drug with a hard outcomes win.
For Amgen, that race is optional rather than existential. The company already runs a large, diversified cardiovascular franchise, so olpasiran is one arrow in a full quiver. But the AI story, whether it holds up or not, pulls attention toward the pipeline, and olpasiran is one of the names that attention settles on.
The readout to watch is the outcomes study. Every Lp(a) drug now has to show that a lower biomarker becomes fewer events, because the September 2026 pelacarsen failure reset the standard for the entire class. Amgen is positioned to answer that question, and the answer will price the stock for years. None of this makes Amgen a pick in the promo, and it does not need to be. The point is that the biggest Lp(a) asset sits outside the list, and watching it is the clearest way to see whether the whole thesis is real.
Ready to see the research? Click here to access Porter Stansberry’s report.
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