New Insulins: Benefits and Challenges

COMMENTARY

New Insulins: Benefits and Challenges

Anne L. Peters, MD

Disclosures

December 11, 2015

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Today I'm going to talk about insulin. Now, you may have noticed that we have many more insulin products on the market than we have ever had before, and there are going to be even more products coming down the pike. I want to try to make sense of all of these different products.

New Concentrations, New Analog Products, and Biosimilars

Most of us are used to the traditional U-100 insulin; that's what insulin syringes are made for. Some of you may have heard of U-500 insulin, which is basically a 5-fold more concentrated regular insulin, and we reserve it for people who are very insulin resistant. It's harder to use because it's more complicated in the sense that you have to figure out the dosing with insulin syringes. Nevertheless, we have discovered that increasing the concentration of insulin can improve some of the qualities that we know are associated with insulin.

One of the newer insulin products is called Toujeo®, and it's actually insulin glargine, which we're used to, but instead of being U-100, it's U-300. As a visual, it comes in this box, which is this light green color with some black polka dots, and the pen looks quite different compared with that gray glargine or Lantus® insulin that you're used to.

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