emphasis mine......
Tuesday June 13, 11:53 am Eastern Time
Forbes.com
Diabetes Cure May Cost Drug Companies Billions
By Matthew Herper
Of the estimated 10 million people in the U.S. who suffer from diabetes, about 5% to 10%
of them are dependent on daily shots of insulin to keep their blood sugar levels from becoming dangerously high.
A new treatment being developed by doctors at the University of Alberta may eliminate insulin-dependent diabetes in the next
decade. Assuming it's perfected, it will save patients but may devastate the multibillion-dollar human insulin market.
Human insulin is an important product for some drug companies. Market leader Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY - news) made 13% of its
$10 billion in 1999 sales from the sale of human insulin. Denmark-based Novo Nordisk (NYSE: NVO - news) sold $1.6
billion worth of insulin products globally last year.
But a new treatment turns the liver into an insulin-generating organ, a sort of jury-rigged pancreas. The treatment is described
by a team doctors at the University of Alberta in the next issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. If it is as
extraordinarily successful as initial results suggest, it could someday make insulin-dependent diabetes a thing of the past. This
would, in turn, decimate the market for insulin.
Here's how it works, according to Dr. Jerome Lakey, who co-wrote the New England Journal of Medicine paper. A pancreas
is taken from a brain-dead organ donor whose heart is still beating. Lakey injects it with an enzyme called Liberase, made by
Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, which starts breaking down the organ. The donor pancreas is then broken down
into individual, insulin-producing cells.
The result, Lakey says, is a simple, elegant treatment. The insulin-producing cells are injected into the patient's side with a
needle, where the bloodstream carries them to the liver.
``The liver is a big filter,'' says Lakey, ``and the cells get stuck in it.''
Once in the liver, the cells begin to produce insulin, taking over for the pancreas.
Other attempts at transplanting pancreas cells have worked in fewer than 10% of patients. And while this technique has so far
been tried in only 10 people, the Alberta doctors say that it has been successful in all of them.
But there's one problem. Since the new insulin-producing cells are taken from another person's body, the receiving patient's
immune system will almost always kill the donor cells, assuming they are attacking germs. The only solution to this response is
to give patients a drug to calm the immune system, making them as dependant on the suppression drug as they were on insulin.
However, there are several different research approaches that may eliminate even this problem. The bottom line is this: In the
next decade or so, Eli Lilly and other drug companies could see the lucrative insulin market replaced by a new surgical
technique. They should be looking to snatch up any intellectual property from this new technique as soon as it goes on the
market.
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