U.S. drugmaker makes progress on weekly insulin shot as Danish competitor stumbles: WSJ

NEW YORK, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) — U.S. drugmaker Eli Lilly announced more progress toward a once-weekly insulin shot, weeks after its Danish competitor Novo Nordisk encountered a significant setback with a similar product, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Thursday.
Lilly, Novo, and French pharmaceutic company Sanofi dominate the global market for insulin, a lifesaving medicine for patients with diabetes. While the new GLP-1 medicines, Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo’s Wegovy, may eventually cut into demand for insulin, it remains an essential medicine, and a major product for the three manufacturers.
“Today, patients on insulin receive injections daily, or even more often, but both Novo and Lilly are working to change that,” said the report.
Lilly said on Thursday that its experimental once-weekly insulin shot, called efsitora, worked as well as daily insulin shots both in patients new to insulin injections, and in patients switching from other insulin brands. The results echo similarly positive data that Lilly announced in May.
“With a simple fixed-dose regimen, once-weekly efsitora could make it easier for people with diabetes to start and manage insulin therapy,” Lilly’s senior vice president of product development, Jeff Emmick, said in a statement.
Lilly is playing catch-up with Novo, which sells a once-weekly insulin product called insulin icodec in Europe, Canada, and other countries. In July, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected the company’s application for approval of the medicine in the United States.
Novo said at the time that the FDA’s rejection letter had made requests for changes to the way the drug is manufactured for patients with Type 1 diabetes. In May, a committee of outside scientific advisors convened by the FDA had said that the benefits of insulin icodec didn’t outweigh the risks in patients with Type 1 diabetes. ■