Hello there and happy Tuesday from STAT’s London outpost, with Andrew Joseph here filling in for Mr. Pharmalot for the day. While it feels like things are slowing down stateside ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, this place is busy diving full speed into Christmas already. We just hope you can enjoy whatever you’re celebrating whenever and wherever that may be. Now to some headlines. …
A next-generation treatment from Novo Nordisk helped patients with diabetes lower their blood sugar and lose weight in a Phase 2 trial, Bloomberg reports. The news comes as a win for Novo, which is testing the drug, called amycretin, in both injectable and oral forms and which has been struggling as its current obesity and diabetes medicines lose market share to Eli Lilly’s products. Novo, which is also testing amycretin in obesity, said it would launch a Phase 3 study of the drug in diabetes next year.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has expanded the availability of a Novartis gene therapy for a rare muscle disorder to older patients, Reuters tells us. The newly approved therapy, branded as Itvisma, won authorization for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy in patients aged 2 years and older who have a confirmed mutation in the survival motor neuron 1 gene. Itvisma contains the same active ingredient as the Swiss drugmaker’s older therapy, Zolgensma, which is approved in the U.S. to treat SMA patients less than 2 years of age. The new treatment has a wholesale acquisition cost of $2.59 million, compared with $2.1 million for Zolgensma.
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