The stock fell on Tuesday about 5 percent in Copenhagen.
Victoza is the only second diabetes drug to demonstrate such heart benefits, after Eli Lilly (LLY.N) and Boehringer Ingelheim's pill Jardiance. The Victoza's medical effect was evident across risks.
John Buse, a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine UNC, that worked on the study said that the impressive thing about this trial was the uniformity across clinical endpoints and its strength.
He believes doctors' line of action to type 2 diabetes therapy will now start to shift to a greater focus on reducing overall risks, as opposed to simply cutting blood sugar levels.
Since about half of deaths in people with diabetes are caused by cardiac disease, decreasing heart risk is considered essential to their care.
Although investors had been expecting a bigger effect, Jefferies analyst Jeffrey Holford said market propects had been for a mid-to-high teens percent decrease in complications.
There was also concern that Victoza did not show to reduce heart risks in American patients watched carefully in the study, in spite of doing so in other parts of the world and producing a solid result worldwide.
The world's biggest diabetes company called Novo had said in the month of March that Victoza reduce heart risks significantly in the study although the scale of the merit was only disclosed on Monday.
The researchers told the American Diabetes Association's (ADA) yearly meeting that 13 percent of patients on Victoza died from cardiovascular causes or suffered non-fatal cardiac attacks or strokes, opposed to 14.9 percent of those on placebo.
Mortalities from cardiac disease were 22 percent lower in the Victoza group.
The Jardiance trial last year demonstrated a similar 14 percent overall relative risk decrease and a 38 percent decrease in cardiovascular deaths.
The Victoza trial, called Leader, had been designed to demonstrate Novo's drug did not raise heart risk, so its superiority is pleasant news for the company, primarily as Sanofi's (SASY.PA) rival Lyxumia failed to show heart merits in an initial test.
Victoza is the biggest seller in a category of drugs called GLP-1 equivalents that stimulate insulin production. They had sales of $2.7 billion last year.
Buse said in an interview that he thinks physicians will look to GLP-1s with greater enthusiasm. Once-daily Victoza is typically prescribed as a third or fourth alternative after patients have first tried various oral medicines.
He also said that the significance of this was that they can start to change the dialogue around diabetes management from one of managing blood sugar to one of managing risk of complications.
Novo's principal science officer, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen commented that the results should strengthen doctors to utilize Victoza earlier, since they could see it offered life-improving therapy.
The discoveries, which involved ensuing 9,340 patients for an average 3.8 years, were also made known online in the New England Medicine Journal.
Gastrointestinal disturbance was the biggest adverse effect with Victoza. There were fewer cases of pancreatitis, which has been observed as a potential problem, although more cases of pancreatic cancer, but there was no significant difference statistically.
Since 2008, U.S. regulators have required studies for new diabetes medicines to demonstrate there is no increase in heart risk, opening a new battleground within various therapies. Lilly is supervising a similar large study to prove the heart profits of its once in a week GLP-1 drug Trulicity.
The Leader study was financed by Novo and supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Post a Comment