Rachel Fairbank in Nature:
The blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic — also sold as the obesity drug Wegovy — can add another health condition to the list of maladies it alleviates. Researchers presented clinical-trial data today at a conference in Stockholm, showing that it significantly reduces the risk of kidney failure and death for people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Scientists are thrilled with the result, and think that the drug, otherwise known by its generic name, semaglutide, will eventually be proved to help a more general population of people with kidney disease. This trial is a first step towards that goal, they say.
Semaglutide manufacturer Novo Nordisk, based in Bagsværd, Denmark, announced in October that it had halted its kidney-disease trial because of a recommendation from an independent data-safety monitoring board that the overwhelmingly positive results made it unethical to continue to give some participants a placebo. But until now, it hadn’t revealed the full data analysis, which is also published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.
More here.