Sunday, December 27, 2009
It's the end of the year 2009, and it may be the end of the road in the United States for two drugs that were developed for diabetes. After huge expenditures of time and money, both Galvus (vildagliptin, a DPP-4 inhibitor) and Victoza (liraglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist) are still awaiting FDA de...
DPP-4 doesn't just cleave GLP-1. It also functions as a tumor suppressor linked to Melanoma, Ovarian cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer. Inhibit DPP-4 and these cancers are more likely to grow. There was a cancer signal in the Januvia trials that was buried in the way that Merck reported tumors. All these drugs modify the way the immune system works and none were tested enough to flush out the long term damage they cause.
These new generation drugs that work on specific genes need different kinds of testing than older, cruder drugs--testing that looks at how they affect ALL functions of the gene they affect. This testing isn't done now. The toll on patients will be frightful, even more so because doctors won't associate cancer in their diabetes patients with the diabetes drug they put them on 4 years before.