New Diabetes Drugs Flooding Into Pharmacies

Diabetes, a chronic blood-sugar disease that affects about 24 million people in the United States and 230 million worldwide, is an increasingly popular and lucrative area of medicine being aggressively targeted by the world’s largest drug companies.

With the nation’s obesity epidemic worsening and contributing to a steep increase in the number of diabetes cases in the last 20 years, the pipeline of new drugs and insulin treatments is overflowing. This week, at a conference sponsored by the American Diabetes Association, drug companies lined up to present their new experimental drugs as well as data on existing drugs they already market.

“Why wouldn’t you get in?” Miller Tabak analyst Les Funtleyder told the Associated Press. “It’s a big market, it’s a chronic market and there’s unmet need.”

People with diabetes most often require daily doses of drugs or insulin to remain healthy. Failure to properly treat Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes can result in blindness, amputation of limbs, and kidney damage, among other injuries. Therefore, drug companies see diabetes medications as providing a steady, increasing stream of revenue.

In 2008 alone, diabetes drugs racked up more than $27 billion in sales worldwide, earning them fourth place on the list of all classes of drugs.

Highlights of New Diabetes Treatments

Among the new diabetes drugs and therapies expected to face Food and Drug Administration review and be coming soon to a doctor’s office near you are:

• A new “smart” insulin pump made by leading medical-device maker Medtronic Inc. The new pump constantly monitors blood-sugar levels to avoid dangerous fluctuations, which can be deadly.

• An extended-release form of the popular diabetes drug Byetta, made by Eli Lilly and Co. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. The new version of the drug would trigger the pancreas to produce more insulin when needed to improve blood glucose control. Byetta is injected twice a day, but the extended-release form, if approved by the FDA, would only require injection once a week. The drug companies hope to launch the extended-release form of Byetta in 2010.

• A once-a-day dose of the generic drug liraglutide made by Novo Nordisk Inc. and a once-a-month GlaxoSmithKline GLP-1 drug called albiglutide.

• Two experimental SGLT-2 inhibitors from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Boehringer Ingelheim. The drugs appear to prevent the kidneys from reabsorbing glucose and reduce kidney damage.

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