In less than a decade since it was proposed, the polypill has been the subject of many studies and remains “the only panacea we can see” for the toll taken by cardiovascular disease, delegates were told at a seminar in London on 13 July.

Denis Xavier is project director and coauthor of the TIPS trial (The Indian Polycap Study) and head of the department of pharmacology at St John’s Medical College in Bangalore. He argued at a seminar organised by C3 Collaborating for Health—an international charity aimed at controlling non-communicable diseases worldwide—that the polypill had demonstrated its safety and efficacy. But several barriers still stood in the way of its wider adoption.

Since Nicholas Wald and Malcolm Law first suggested the idea of combining a statin, three blood pressure lowering drugs, …