Novo Nordisk diabetes drug Victoza fails to reduce heart failure risk

pharmafile | August 5, 2016 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development |  Eli Lily, Novo Nordisk, Victoza, diabetes, heart failure 

Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Victoza (liraglutide), which was found to cut cardiovascular risks in sufferers of heart disease, has failed to deliver the same level of benefit to patients suffering from heart failure in a recent Phase II study.

Following Eli Lily’s findings that its diabetes drug Jardiance (empagliflozin) reduces the risk of heart failure by 39%, Novo Nordisk has tested its own diabetes treatment in the hope of finding similar benefits. University of Pennsylvania researchers tested the drug in 300 heart failure patients with and without diabetes hoping to find evidence of improved symptom measures, reduced hospitalisations and better survival rates. Unfortunately, the drug was no more effective than placebo, with no effect on deaths or hospitalisations; over the course of the six month study, 38% of participants were re-hospitalised and 12% died.

Lead study author Dr. Kenneth Margulies commented: “One goal was to see, completely independent of diabetes, whether liraglutide helps heart failure in people who already have a pretty advanced degree of heart failure. On that we have a pretty definitive answer: no. We were hoping for improvement in heart failure, and we didn’t get that at all.”

Matt Fellows