The Business Case for a Biosimilar Company to Bring a Copy of Levemir to Market

My readers may recall that in November 2023, I blogged that Novo Nordisk announced it plans to retire (stop making) its first " Lantus killer " known as Levemir (insulin detemir injection) in the U.S. in 2024 (catch my post at https://blog.sstrumello.com/2023/11/novo-nordisk-to-discontinue-levemir-in.html for more). At the time I learned of the announcement, I was on vacation in Amsterdam, so I just made a note of the development and blogged about it a few weeks later upon my return.Like other patients my age, I have endured the company ' s previous insulin " retirements " . Novo Nordisk ' s time-frame for withdrawing this particular insulin from the market is happening unacceptably fast. For example, the company said that Levemir FlexPens were expected to be unavailable by mid-January 2024  — a matter of weeks following the announcement. Exactly why anyone without a visual impairmentneeds an expensive insulin pen injection device (pens were devised for dosing prandial insulin on-the-run, not for daily-dosed basal insulin) for a basal insulin which only needs to be dosed once per day is unclear to me (I suspect the real reason manufacturers even sell insulin pens for basal insulins is because pharma aims to make insulin injections less threatening for insulin-naive Type 2 patients), but compared to Novo Nordisk ' s prior insulin retirements (for example, when it stopped making the entire Lente series consisting of Semilente, Lente and Ultralente) which were a...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2024 Biosimilar Levemir Novo Nordisk PBM Source Type: blogs