Case Study

Avandia

Avandia, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, is one of GSK’s top selling medicines. Avandia was launched in 1999 but it is the outcome of research that began some 20 years earlier.

Type 2 diabetes has two causes – an inability to produce enough insulin; and insulin resistance, an inability to respond to insulin that is available. It causes a rise in blood sugar which can have devastating consequences for the patient including blindness, heart attacks and strokes.

Beecham, a GSK legacy company, began researching type 2 diabetes in the 1970s. At that time there were two types of oral sugar-lowering drugs available. These worked by stimulating the body to produce more insulin or by helping the liver to control blood sugar levels. But the treatments were not successful for everybody. Furthermore, no diabetes treatment remains effective in one patient forever. As the disease progresses, patients must combine a number of different drugs.

Beecham focused its research on treatments that used a new mechanism - combating insulin resistance - an area that little was known about. It took about six years of research before a promising compound was identified. By 1990 the team had developed a novel and potent compound that was first tested in human clinical trials in 1993.

With complex diseases such as type 2 diabetes, the failure rate in research is high. Despite significant investment in R&D by the pharmaceutical industry, no new drugs were introduced for more than 40 years before insulin sensitisers, such as Avandia, became available. Avandia has now been used by more than seven million people worldwide, helping them to control their disease and improve their quality of life.

Diabetes research at GSK has not stopped. We are investing more than £175 million in several large outcome studies to assess the effect of Avandia on the long-term complications of diabetes and to see whether it can be used to prevent at-risk people from developing the disease. Two new combination treatments, Avandamet and Avandaryl, have been launched that combine Avandia with other diabetes treatments.

This makes it easier for patients to maintain their treatment regime. GSK has another novel diabetes drugs in clinical trials and an ongoing research programme at our metabolic research centre in North Carolina.

The rapid increase in obesity, a major cause of type 2 diabetes, and the appearance of the disease in children, makes this research more important than ever.