Exhale: Lilly Bails On Alkermes Insulin Inhaler
4 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // March 7th, 2008 // 2:58 pm
Call it the Exubera factor. Alkermes says Lilly expects to walk away from the diabetes device within the week, the second time in less than a year that a big drugmaker decided an insulin inhaler lacks commercial prospects. Pfizer, you may recall, famously failed to properly market Exubera and, last fall, walked away, but not before suffering tremendous embarassment over its weak promotional efforts.
UPDATE: Late Friday, Lilly got around to releasing its statement, and the drugmaker insists the decision is due to the “increasing uncertainties of the regulatory environment,” and commercialization concerns “It is also important to emphasize that our decision is not due to any safety concerns observed by Lilly or raised by the independent data safety monitoring board during our development of AIR Insulin,” says Steve Paul, executive vp of science and technology.
Despite the rejection from Lilly, Alkermes hopes to complete Phase III testing, which is expected to finish this year. “Data from these studies will provide patients, physicians and the scientific community with long-awaited and important data for the evaluation of new diabetes medications,” Alkermes says, somewhat defiantly in a statement.
Still, this may be a hard sell. Initially, insulin inhalers were thought to offer appeal, but Exubera proved clumsy, resembled a bong, and, significantly, docs were concerned about impaired lung function. In an interview last October, Alkermes chairman Richard Pops told Reuters that his own device may have similar effects on lung function. “We’re assuming that pulmonary insulins in that regard are all pretty much the same,” he said.
AV Block
Sorry to mention this, but the puns on Exubera and inhaled insulin were funnier back in October.
Ed Silverman
Hi AV,
Well, honestly, I wasn’t aiming for funny. I think ‘exhale’ still seems an apt way to sum things up, given that we have a new development involving yet another drugmaker. And the only other mention that could be read as a pun was the phrase about resemblance to a bong, but that simply reiterates what was a valid criticism all along.
Nonetheless, I’ll keep my joke book and thesaurus handy for the next marketing disaster.
Cheers
ed
Scott
After the billions of dollars big pharma have wasted on this “me-too” product (one which no one wanted to pay for, and served no clinical need that wasn’t already being served), perhaps all of these companies will start to develop a form of insulin which is very badly needed … one which cannot cause hypoglycemia. So far, however, only Beverly, Massachusetts nanotech startup SmartCells has made any real progress on this, leaving Novo, Lilly and Sanofi Aventis scratching their heads as to what went wrong.
Chad Shanks, RN
When I first heard of an insulin inhaler, I thought it was a novel idea. I have family members with insulin-dependant diabetes; two of whom have been on insulin since early childhood. For kids in particular, the insulin inhaler might have proven to be very beneficial.