An injection pen of Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s weight reduction drug, is displayed in Latest York City on Dec. 11, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
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Good morning! Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and other drugmakers showed off encouraging data on weight reduction and diabetes drugs last week.
Corporations shared results on the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, the world’s biggest scientific conference focused on diabetes research, prevention and care.
The drug developments come amid growing investor interest within the treatment of metabolic diseases and specifically, a buzzy class of medicines called GLP-1s
But drugmakers presented treatments that use different approaches than traditional GLP-1s resembling Novo Nordisk’s popular weight reduction injection Wegovy and diabetes counterpart Ozempic. The 2 medications mimic a hormone produced within the gut to suppress an individual’s appetite.
Corporations are also pivoting away from specializing in weight reduction alone in trials. Some drugmakers are examining their drugs’ potential to treat other health conditions, while others are seeing whether a drugs can preserve lean muscle mass in patients while also promoting weight reduction.
Listed here are just a few of the highlights from the conference:
- Eli Lilly released additional data from two late-stage clinical trials showing that its weight reduction injection Zepbound helped resolve a typical sleeping disorder called obstructive sleep apnea in almost half of patients. The corporate said Zepbound could win an expanded U.S. approval for that use as early as the tip of the yr.
- Novo Nordisk presented results from key clinical trials on semaglutide, the lively ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic, in diabetes, obesity and chronic kidney disease. That features the total results from a late-stage trial on Ozempic in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease. The weekly injection significantly lowered the chance of kidney disease progression and death from kidney or cardiovascular complications in patients. Latest data also showed that those advantages are consistent no matter whether patients are also treated with a category of diabetes medications called sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors. Novo Nordisk expects U.S. regulators to make a call on an expanded approval for that use in January 2025.
- Zealand Pharma presented positive results from an early-stage clinical trial on its experimental weekly injection petrelintide, which targets the amylin hormone. The drug led to eight.6% weight reduction at 16 weeks, compared with 1.7% amongst patients who took a placebo. The Danish company sees the medication as a substitute for GLP-1s for weight reduction.
- Altimmune released full data from a mid-stage clinical trial on its experimental obesity drug pemvidutide. The treatment preserved lean muscle mass while promoting weight reduction in adults with obesity, with nearly all of the reduction from fat. A subgroup evaluation on 50 patients found that only 21.9% of their weight reduction was from lean muscle mass.
- Viking Therapeutics unveiled pre-clinical data on a “series” of experimental drugs called dual amylin and calcitonin receptor agonists, or DACRAs. The outcomes show that the corporate’s DACRAs reduced the quantity of food rats would eat in the primary three days after a single dose. After three days following the dose, the rats saw as much as an 8% reduction in body weight in comparison with the rats who received Novo Nordisk’s experimental weight reduction drug CagriSema.
- Gilead presented data from a pre-clinical study on its experimental oral GLP-1 called GS-4571. The trial found that treatment improved glucose tolerance in mice and led to five% to six% weight reduction over five days, in response to a Sunday note from Jefferies analysts. The note, citing a poster on the conference, added that obese monkeys saw 8% weight reduction after 30 days.
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Latest in health-care technology
Oracle declares general availability of AI documentation assistant for doctors
The Oracle Headquarters in Austin, Texas, on April 24, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Oracle on Monday expanded access to its artificial intelligence-powered tool called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which goals to save lots of doctors time by automating a few of their documentation.
Administrative tasks like paperwork are sometimes burdensome for health-care staff, as nearly 65% of doctors feel like they’re a significant explanation for burnout, in response to a February survey from Athenahealth. Physicians spend a median of 15 hours per week outside their normal hours maintaining with the workload, the survey said.
As an illustration, Dr. Ryan McFarland, a family medicine doctor at Hudson Physicians in Wisconsin, sees a median of 25 patients per day. He has to draft a clinical note after each appointment to record what took place and what to follow up on, which he said amounts to “several hours” of documentation every day.
“That is just the documentation, that is not responding to lab results, patient questions, messages,” he told CNBC in an interview. “It might get very cumbersome attempting to get your note and documentation done on top of truly doing patient care.”
Oracle said its Clinical Digital Assistant may help alleviate this administrative burden. Doctors can access the tool through an app on their phone, and so they hit a button to record their visits with patients. Once they stop recording, Oracle’s AI mechanically generates a clinical note based on the appointment so the doctors not need to jot down it themselves.
Only the health-care organizations’ approved representatives will find a way to access the recordings, Oracle said.
The assistant works alongside Oracle’s electronic health record, so doctors may verbally ask it to drag up details about a patient’s medical history, like their latest blood test results, the corporate said. In other words, doctors can spend less time looking through records to seek out the relevant information they need.
Oracle has been testing the tool with 13 health-care organizations, including Hudson Physicians. Oracle said its assistant has saved clinicians a median of 4 and a half minutes per patient, in addition to 20% to 40% of their day by day documentation time. The tool is usually available in ambulatory clinics, or clinics that should not attached to hospitals, as of Monday.
“This shall be form of a practice requirement in our business going forward,” McFarland said. “The accuracy of the notes is significantly better, you catch things you may forget to document. It’s a time saver, significantly.”
McFarland said he’s worked with other dictation tools up to now, however the software often caused errors and struggled with fast speech. He has also worked with human scribes which might be more accurate, though he said they may be time consuming to coach and difficult to maintain employed. Oracle’s assistant performs like an akin to a human author, McFarland said.
“I believe from a note generating standpoint it’s 90% to 100% where it must be,” he said.
McFarland said he thinks the tool does well with complex medical terminology and might even capture abbreviations. He said he thinks there’s room for improvement with a number of the specialty-specific care, in addition to how the assistant may help with other functionalities like placing orders for imaging and sending out referrals and return-to-clinic reminders.
Some providers at Hudson Physicians are more particular concerning the sort of their notes than others, so McFarland said some doctors still spend time editing. Even so, the clinic has seen a 100% adoption rate for Oracle’s assistant, which McFarland said he’s never seen occur before.
“It has been a game changer for us, and we’ll keep using it,” he said.
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