Drugmaker AstraZeneca has brought in its novel combination therapy Xigduo XR for the treatment of people with type-2 diabetes to help improve their blood sugar levels through better compliance to the medication regime.
Diabetes is not well controlled among people because they don’t take their medicines as required or stop because they feel better, says AstraZeneca's head of medical affairs Anilda D'souza. A once-a-day drug like Xigduo will help reduce the pill burden on patients and improve compliance, she told Business Line .
Touted to be the first combination therapy in this class of drugs to be launched in India, Xigduo combines metformin and dapagliflozin in a once-a-day format.
Older people often have multiple medicines to take and sometimes miss out on their dosage, she said, explaining the pill burden that could reduce with this. And the extended release (XR) format allows the drug to be released in the body over a 24 hour period. The drug is pegged at an “India specific” price of ₹55 per tablet, she said. India has over 70 million people living with diabetes.
Both drugs in the combination have distinct actions and between the two the blood glucose is maintained without causing hypoglycemia or a condition where the sugar levels dip to dangerously low levels, she explains.
The product had been approved in developed markets, including Europe and the US, in 2014.
Explaining the delay in rolling it out here, she said, the company had made regulatory filings in 2015 to get approvals to market it in India.
Explaining the adverse effects to watch out for, she said, globally the drug is seen to be well tolerated, with mild incidents like diarrhoea, nausea etc and infection among women.