Dr Liz Zhou Discusses Real-World Implications of Toujeo Switching Trial

Findings from real-world studies will help clinicians and other health stakeholders better understand the use of Toujeo compared with Lantus, particularly regarding treatment dosage patterns, for patients with type 2 diabetes, according to Liz Zhou, MD, director of evidence-based medicine at Sanofi Medical Affairs.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What did you learn from clinical trials on comparing real-world results of basal insulin dose changes that will inform future studies on glargine?

There actually have been a lot of questions about Toujeo dosing from clinicians and the payer side, for instance, does Toujeo require higher dosing? In this study, what we see is that for patients who are the matched cohort who are persistent in their treatment in the 6 months follow up, an up-titration of 7 to 9% of basal insulin was observed. Regardless of whether those are patients who switched from Lantus to Toujeo, or they continued on Lantus, which actually proves or confirms that there’s a need for titration, an up-titration, especially for patients with type 2 diabetes that experience disease progression or clinical inertia.

In addition, we also see that the percent those change for Toujeo and the percent those change for Lantus are comparable, and we see similar A1c in the baseline and the follow-up. I think that’s very informing, that’s why we think this study is very timely for the healthcare decision makers to better understand the usage of Toujeo compared to Lantus in the real-world setting, especially looking at treatment pattern and dosing.

What is a key takeaway from the study?

The research really looked into insulin dosing, and we wanted to look into claims data more, and beyond dosing, we wanted to look further into the clinical outcomes for the patients who stayed on Lantus or switched to Toujeo. Hoping to provide additional evidence beyond the Toujeo EDITION programs, looking into different types of outcomes.

Dosing is more of a treatment pattern type of outcome; clinical outcomes, persistence, and in the future healthcare utilization and costs are something that we want to look further into. I think this first study on claims is giving us a very good idea of the direction we’re going.