Diabetes thrice-weekly insulin drug Degludec shows well in trials

A phase 2 trial into the diabetes insulin drug Degludec has found that people with type 2 diabetes could have injections only three times a week without it having any major ill effect.
Although further research is necessary to test whether it will put patients at a higher risk of low blood sugar, it is hoped that the insulin drug will replace the onerous job of injecting insulin up to four times a day faced by many diabetics .
The drug, which is manufactured by pharma giant Novo Nordisk, was tested on 245 adults aged 18 between 75 with type 2 diabetes, none of which had started to take insulin, who were randomly given either an existing form of insulin daily, glargine, or Degludec, either in a daily dose or in a three-times-a-week dose.
It was shown that, over a four-month period, the three-times-a-week doses of Degludec managed to control levels of blood sugar in the body about as effectively as the other treatments and had about the same amount of participants with hypoglycaemic episodes.
Researcher Dr. Bernard Zinma, of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, also said “It’s an exciting new insulin, it’s an ultra-long-acting insulin and the real issue is, of course, this is a small study, a proof-of-concept study, and we have to wait for the results of much larger studies to know where its place will be in a clinical setting.”