The future of human insulin: tailored and oral

Prevailing human insulin analogs to be followed by tailored insulin analogs and insulins with optimized drug delivery solutions

Barcelona, Spain | October 28, 2008 | The Business Intelligence firm La Merie S.L.conducted an analysis of the product portfolios and R&D pipelines of human insulin-based products. The study revealed that three companies dominate the worldwide insulinmarket, but experience more and more competition in volume sales of insulin by local manufacturers in off-patent countries, especially in China, India and Russia. The worldwide market of the major human insulin products in 2007 was US$ 10.2 bln. Insulinanalogs posted double digit sales growth due to successive replacement (67.5 % of total sales) of human insulin. The first Indian company is conducting clinical trials in the USwith its rhu insulin and even plans to develop and launch a biosimilar insulin analog inthe Western countries upon patent expiry in 2014. Three companies in off-patent countries have locally produced insulin analogs either in the market or in pre-registration phases. The next generations of insulin will be “tailored” insulin and oral insulin, dominating over the failed inhaled insulin approach and other non-injectable drug delivery solutions. These results and more were found in the search conducted by La Merie Business Intelligence. The evaluation can be acquired at La Merie’s online store (www.pipelinereview.com/store ).

Insulin therapy has evolved in the last century from purified bovine or porcine insulin tobiosynthetic human insulin to recombinant human insulin and eventually to recombinantinsulin analogs as the 3rd generation of human insulin. Tailored insulin analogs as the 4ht generation insulin and other long-acting insulins for injection with drug deliverysolutions aim at optimized pharmacokinetic profiles in order to avoid hyper- and hypoglycemic episodes. After the failure of inhaled insulin (only one clinical stage project left), most of the R&D efforts are now made on oral insulin products. The pipeline of oralinsulin shows at least seven different oral insulin formulations in clinical development,and at least six in preclinical development. The first oral insulin product is already marketed and in advanced registration in many countries. Further six different projectswith non-injectable drug delivery of insulin are in clinical development: intranasal,transdermal and rectal application.

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PipelineReview.com is the News Center and Online Store of La Merie BusinessIntelligence focused on Research and Development in the Biopharmaceutical Industry.Visitors of PipelineReview.com will find R&D relevant press releases and can receive selected R&D news from one or more of the site’s News Channels. La Merie Daily and La Merie Biologics conveniently bring via e-mail a daily or weekly selection of the most interesting news from biopharmaceutical R&D. For more information visit www.pipelinereview.com.

SOURCE: La Merie