Novo Nordisk Buys British ‘Smart’ Insulin Diabetes Biotech in deal worth €702M

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Northerner

Northerner

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Novo Nordisk acquired the UK biotech Ziylo, which develops glucose-responsive insulin treatments for diabetes that act in response to changes in blood sugar levels.

The Danish big-pharma, which is already a big player in the diabetes space, acquired the full rights to Ziylo’s technology in a deal worth up to €702M ($800M). Novo will use the technology to develop so-called ‘smart’ insulin treatments for diabetics, designed to be taken once a day, that are only active when a patient’s blood sugar levels are too high or too low.

Smart insulin could lead to safer diabetes treatments by reducing the risk of low blood sugar or ‘hypos’, one of the main side effects of insulin therapy. Like conventional insulin, the technology is designed to keep high blood sugar, the hallmark symptom of diabetics, in check. But unlike normal insulin, it is designed to ‘switch off’ when blood glucose gets too low, or switch on when it gets too high.

https://labiotech.eu/medical/novo-nordisk-smart-insulin-diabetes/

This must be almost ready, they've been talking about smart insulin practically since I was diagnosed, and that was 10 years ago.... 😉 🙄
 
That’s good news. As you say, it must be almost ready but Ziylo isn’t big enough for the big roll out. Can’t wait🙂
 
Fingers crossed, that's the one I'd like to see come to fruition.
 
khskel said:
Fingers crossed, that's the one I'd like to see come to fruition.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's long been the one I've had the most interest in 🙂 Such a shame so much other money went into inhaled insulin that nobody really wanted and never came up to expectations even though it made it onto the market.
 
Medtronic and the other pump makers won't be happy about this. If it works with a once a day injection then pumps would become redundant.
 
lot more information on this on the unit dx website
will be at least 4 years before this becomes available, if it works at all and passes all the toxicology and efficacy, and even if all goes well.
 
do think the biomimetic glucose receptor developed by Professor Davis and team at the University of Bristol after a lifetime of 20 years of dogged research is absolutely brilliant and, if it could be harmonised with Novo's world leading expertise in insulin analogues to develop a glucose responsive insulin that, say, kept the glucose below 7, and involved only one injection a day, would be worthy of Nobel prize recognition.
 
Indeed, we also live in hope that when it appears, the NHS will pay for it. I have my doubts under the current government, if they ever get back to doing any governing instead of fighting like a sack of ferrets.
 
another interesting article is howgego's 'sensing the sweet spot' in chemistry world: the question will be whether this can get through the toxicology and whether the on and off switches are sufficiently sensitive to control glucose within a reasonably physiological range or at least 4-9 say....still at least 5 years off.
 
As a long-term and current user of NN's insulins (so I'm biased LOL) I have to say it sounds good to me - it would make insulin pumps redundant without the initial up front investment in the hardware and also the added ongoing cos of the consumables - which is shedloads more expensive than MDI, so as pumps come up for renewal and don't need to be, that would free up money so that smart insulin could be offered to more diabetics. I mean - nobody knows what price it would have to be sold at so we can't at this stage assess/guess the costs.

Having experienced the change from animal insulin through 'human' to the current analogue et al, that process hit the diabetic in the street over about 10/12 years I think, so I'm probably unlikely to see it come to fruition - or probably won't care when it does LOL.

But who on earth wouldn't rather only have to have one jab a day than MDI or all the extra fiddling about with a pump!
 
suspect I'm in the same boat as you trophyw being too old (or already dead) to benefit, probably, if this comes to fruition though agree with your other comments, it might be trialled at NN's Oxford facility.
as a sufferer also from Addison's for nearly 40 years, always amazed at the cost of hydrocortisone 10 mg- 30 tablets cost £80 or thereabouts so yearly cost of this alone to the NHS is around £2000, lifetime cost about 100000, cost of manufacture is about 2p per tablet, I would guess. Then there is the cost of fludrocortisone as well.
looks to me that Novo has been researching glucose responsive insulin for years, as their other insulins are going off patent, and has until now always been stymied by the lack of specificity of their own glucose sensing molecules.
 
correction: it seems that the NHS cost of hydrocortisone 10mg is just over £1 a pill not as above- still v expensive.
further research on the internet shows that Merck, Sanofi, Eli Lilly all have programmes for smart insulin though Merck's first effort based on boronic acid was pulled in clinical trials for lack of efficacy- still think Novo the most likely to get there, out of all of them, first, if any of them can do it, and if the Univ Bristol glucose receptor they will be using is stable and can be conjugated reliably to turn off insulin when the glucose level drops... listening to desert island discs today, the subject there, an eminent economics prof at UCL seemed to be arguing that the state should direct research in areas like this-I don't think so! NN did buy the univ Bristol spin-out co but paid through the nose for it!
 
Yes, Novo may have been researching this for a while, with no success, so instead they buy a company that has had success, or at least a very promising line of research. I think this may appear earlier than folk may think. As Novonord says, Novos insulins are running out of patent so they will be chasing the Holy Grail as a top priority.

The main problem is in rejection of the proteins they have to mix the insulin with. If they can’t conquer that, the efficacy will disappear rapidly.
 
Guess you're right Mike, the conjugate is based on lectins, proteins that when introduced to subjects many of whom already have a tendency to autoimmunity as dm type 1 or type 1.5 with or without other autoimmune conditions, eg thyroid disorders, pernicious anaemia, addison's, coeliac, rheumatoid, lupus, might provoke a further strong immune lupus like reaction to the foreign protein.The FDA takes a particularly careful line on adjuvants and this sort of thing; the Stability of the lectin in the systemic circulation is also unknown until tested in clinical trials.
 
Or, in my case, Ulcerative Colitis, asthma, chronic pancreatic plus whatever is eating away my motor neurones, so how I would react to foreign proteins is a point of interest.
 
much discussion in the press today over the soaring hike in costof T3 treats some forms hypothyroidism.... many on here are sufferers.
seems, from the article in Nature Chemistry, the glucose sensing molecule NN has purchased is likely to be stable and non-toxic in the circulation so the remaining questions are over immunogenicity and whether it can be reliably conjugated to switch off bound insulin rapidly when glucose drops say below 6 or 5.5
lot of interest in the article in Nature Chemistry, it's on the 98 centile of all published at the time...
 
another article on the unit DX website; seems this smart insulin being mainly targeted at type 2 though could also be applicable to type 1.
NN claims to be making progress with stem cells for type 1 - it's likely a long road though.
 
looks as though the main collaborations are with Cornell, for encapsulation, and UCSF for GMP stem cell production for stem cells in type 1...
 
You’ve hit on an interesting aspect to all this, novonord. There is more money to be made treating T2 than T1, so the focus will always be skewed in terms of money for research.
 
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