Health-care company Sanofi-Aventis has announced its diabetes drug Toujeo is now commercially available in pharmacies nationwide.
“Toujeo is now on-stock in major drugstores, and Sanofi is completing its availability to other minor drugstores and hospitals in the country,” the pharma giant said in a media briefing with Sanofi reps and diabetes educators on Toujeo in January. Prescription Toujeo is a once-daily basal insulin based on a broadly used molecule (insulin glargine) injection used to control blood sugar in adults with diabetes mellitus. It contains three times as much insulin in 1 ml as standard insulin (100 units/ml) and Sanofi’s own first-generation and long-established Lantus (rDNA origin).
Lantus was first made commercially available in the US in 2002, and it is a basal insulin that addresses fasting plasma glucose and treats Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. To date, it is the most prescribed insulin in the US.
“Lantus is already gold standard when it comes to insulinization. Normally, the treatment guidelines say, when all else fails, you have to start the patient on insulin and it is preferably basal insulin. Lantus is effective, it reduces A1C control compared to the older insulins. The hypoglycemia profile is also better and safer, meaning espisodes have been hugely reduced. However, there are some patients who have certain limitations that are not being addressed, and that’s where Toujeo helps them,” Sanofi said.
Toujeo in terms of efficacy, according to Sanofi, is equally as effective as Lantus. However, in terms of hypoglycemia, it has a flatter profile. This means that its profile is consistent, thus the tendency to have hypoglycemia is even lessened.
Toujeo is available in the Toujeo SoloSTAR, a disposable prefilled pen that contains 450 units of Toujeo and requires one-third of the injection volume to deliver the same number of insulin units as compared to the Lantus SoloSTAR.
“Despite the proven efficacy of insulin, ensuring effective titration and maintenance can be a challenge for both patients and health-care professionals due to hypoglycemia concerns. Toujeo provides a new option that may help patients manage their diabetes,” said Dr. John Anderson, former president of the American Diabetes Association, through a statement released by Sanofi-Aventis in February 2016.
This announcement was made following the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the French drugmaker’s new basal insulin based on the review of results from the Edition clinical trial program. The study was comprised of “a series of international Phase III studies evaluating the efficacy and safety of Toujeo in more than 3,500 adults from broad and diverse diabetes populations [Type 1 and Type 2].”
In a separate study conducted by Prof. Masato Odawara of Tokyo Medical University, the Japan-based results confirmed that “patients experienced less nocturnal hypoglycemia and no increase in hypoglycemia at any time of the day. This outcome was delivered with glycemic control comparable to Lantus and is consistent with the findings in the global Edition program in people with Type 2 diabetes.”
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