London doctor inducted into Canadian Medical Hall of Fame

A Western University physician who has helped transform the treatment of high cholesterol is being inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Dr. Robert Hegele, a professor at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and a scientist at Robarts Research Institute, was announced Thursday as one of this year's inductees. He calls the honour "super meaningful", and an achievement of a lifetime.

"It's really an incredible honour," Hegele said. "To now find that I am among them as well, it's almost unbelievable."

Hegele is a world leader in the study of lipid disorders, conditions involving cholesterol and other fats in the blood that dramatically increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

He said that while many people think high cholesterol is primarily caused by diet, genetics play a much larger role.

"Only about 15 or 20 per cent of the cholesterol in our blood comes from our diet," Hegele said. "Most of the cholesterol in our bloodstream is genetically programmed."

Over the course of his career, Hegele has used genetic tools developed through the Human Genome Project to identify genes that cause dangerously high cholesterol in otherwise healthy people. His lab has also developed tests that can pinpoint genetic risk, which helps physicians intervene earlier with treatment.

At the same time, Hegele runs a lipid clinic in London that serves as both a care centre and a research hub. Patients from across Ontario come to his practice to be tested, monitored and treated for complex cholesterol disorders.

His clinic was also the first in North America to trial injectable cholesterol-lowering drugs that are now widely available. Some of his patients in London were the very first in the world to receive the treatments, years before they had a name, when they were known only by numbers in clinical trials.

Those therapies, now standard, can lower cholesterol by up to 80 per cent with few side effects.

Hegele said the pace of progress has been dramatic, with therapies evolving from pills to injectables, giving patients more effective options than ever before.

"Patients today have a lot of options and the prognosis is much better compared to a generation ago," he said.

For years, Hegele has taken medical students on field trips to the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in London to learn about past inductees, such as insulin co-discoverer Frederick Banting.

Now, he said, it's humbling to know a future class of students may be learning about his own career.