Patients with type 1 diabetes need to inject insulin with a frequency of up to five times a day. This poses an issue for elderly patients as they may forget. But a new insulin called Icodec was developed a few years ago and it has now successfully passed the third phase of clinical trials.
In a trial conducted by the University of Surrey involving 582 participants for 26 weeks, the difference in the severity of stage one diabetes between those who received Icodec once a week and daily injections was only 0.05%. This according to the researchers is a percentage difference that is too small to have an impact on health. Thus Icodec has the same level of effectiveness as daily injections.
Icodec differs from regular insulin in that it has a half-life of seven days. That way the insulin will stay in the body and only need to be injected once a week. However, Icodec is still not perfect because throughout the trial, hypoglycemia incidents occurred more frequently than those receiving daily insulin. More tests will be done before this once-weekly insulin injection can be used safely by all patients.