With Tirzepatide, a 'Great Future' for Patients With T2D

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm here to talk about tirzepatide, a dual GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonists that's under investigation for the management of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and fatty liver disease.

We're all very used to GLP-1 receptor agonists. They've been around for over a decade. These are medications such as dulaglutide or semaglutide, which is sort of the new frontier in the management of type 2 diabetes. They're what we call unimolecular multiagonists, the drugs that are agonizing not just the GLP-1 receptor but other receptors as well. With tirzepatide, it is GLP-1 as well as the second incretin hormone, GIP.

Tirzepatide has completed five of the pivotal clinical trials in type 2 diabetes. It's my understanding that these will be used for a regulatory filing with the FDA sometime this year, and there have been recent publications and presentations of four of these studies.

These trials span the spectrum of patients with type 2 diabetes: one study in patients treated only with diet and exercise, with a duration of about 4.5 years of diabetes, comparing three doses of tirzepatide with placebo, all the way to a trial in patients already on basal insulin. So, in this case, insulin glargine with a 14-plus-year history of type 2 diabetes. It's also been in one study compared with semaglutide in patients who are on metformin monotherapy. Another one of the studies, in patients who were on metformin with or without an SGLT2 inhibitor, compared tirzepatide with advancing therapy with a basal insulin, in this case, insulin degludec.