BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Beta testing GPR40

Takeda, Connexios: Early data in race of GPR40 drugs for diabetes

August 22, 2011 7:00 AM UTC

With concerns about cardiovascular safety and cancer signals dampening optimism about the future of diabetes therapies, there is an emerging race to demonstrate that activating free fatty acid receptor 1 can avoid such safety issues because the target is expressed almost exclusively on pancreatic islet beta cells.

To be commercially competitive, companies will likely need to show in the clinic what has been seen in vitro: that stimulating the target with a GPR40 agonist has potential as a disease-modifying strategy that can preserve and even improve beta cell function and therefore warrant use in the earliest stages of disease...