blockbuster alert if...

Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca new diabetes drug, dapagliflozin, passed the first big test on its way to an approval and certain blockbuster status by successfully completing a major phase III trial. Many medications used to treat diabetes today work by attempting to control the amount of sugar circulating in the blood stream. The problem is that even when the medication works well there can be continuous elevated blood sugar levels because the body wants to hold on to glucose for its own energy needs while medications want to reduce it. Dapaglifozin works by causing the body to eliminate the excess glucose instead of absorbing it, so when used with other blood sugar lowering medications, this new drug would hopefully manage blood sugar levels more efficiently than is possible today. The thing to keep an eye on though, is the safety profile. I would be wary of any drug that works by inhibiting an enzyme at work in the kidneys, which dapaglifozin seems to do....
However analysts seem to think this new drug could be a real winner and as the first of a new class of medications to treat diabetes, its looking up for BMS and AZ. If you're interested, pick up some AZ stock and follow that up with BMS because this was originally AZ's product in the first place, otherwise sit and wait to see what the other phase III work shows...

See this article from Reuters for some light reading

Some less upbeat news. SciClone stopped its phase 2 late stage pancreatic cancer trial because of findings from a review by a safety monitoring committee. That is not good for the future of the drug, in my opinion, and another hit in the battle against a particularly deadly disease. Don't jump onboard with SciClone quite yet, for that reason...

See the press release here and check out SciClone's pipeline here