Day 3 ADA Chicago: Incretins

The third day of the American Diabetes Association’s convention in the so-called Windy City blew me away in more ways than one.

While Chicago is in fact hardly as windy as my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, I was blown away not only by the shear size and efficiency of the Second City, its other and more appropriate moniker for this still first-rate city. Beyond that, a powerful presentation at the end of the third day concluded my active participation in the convention and was a real blow-out for me.

Novo Nordisk hosted the presentation, which it billed as an interactive discussion about the two newest classes of diabetes drugs. Only one drug in each class is available yet:  Byetta is the first GLP-1, and Januvia is the first DPP-4.

But Novo Nordisk now has a second and most promising GLP-1 mimetic in Phase 3 trials and hopes to have it available for us to use in a year or two. It’s called liraglutide, pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, like li-RA-glu-tide. Like Byetta, it mimics the action of human glucagon-like peptide, except that it lasts a lot longer in our systems and is therefore a lot more powerful.

By coincidence the presentation that I attended last night at the end of the third day of this year’s convention mimics two presentations that I went to at last year’s ADA convention. Last year the high point was these exciting and huge presentations that drew crowds of 1,000 of us to hear about new research on Byetta. Last night’s presentation was likewise exciting and huge.

Again about 1,000 of us crowded into a huge room to get ourselves up-to-date about Byetta and similar drugs. Over an excellent dinner of Chilean sea bass and chicken, about 900 of us got seats at 90 tables in the Fairmont’s “Imperial Ballroom.” Another hundred or two unlucky souls came too late for the dinner and had to sit at the back of the huge hall without food.

The Chicago convention center itself just doesn’t have room for that big a dinner. It is packed full of meetings from 8 a.m. until late in the evening. So the overflow has to go to the big hotels like the Fairmont in Chicago's New East Side.

Dr. Daniel Drucker, a professor at the University of Toronto, moderated the presentation. He is North America’s leading expert on GLP-1 mimics (which he prefers to call GLP-1 agonists). I had consulted with him early this year on some technical points for my forthcoming book about losing weight with Byetta.

The other two speakers were Dr. Jens Holst, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, who probably has written more professional journal articles about GLP-1 than anyone else, and Dr. Robert Ratner, vice president for scientific affairs at MedStar Research Institute in Hyattsville, Maryland, and a professor of medicine at the Georgetown University Medical School.

The unscripted part of the presentation was the best part. With one exception, the scripted parts – the talks that the speakers prepared and rehearsed ahead of time – were old news to me. The one exception was Dr. Holst’s summary of the positive cardiovascular benefits that GLP-1 offers. I plan a future article about that here after I get a chance to study the half-dozen journal articles that he referenced.