Eli Lilly Will End Its Sale of 4 Insulins
Jul. 6–Eli Lilly and Co. will put out the word today that it is discontinuing U.S. sales of four insulin products, including its remaining animal-based insulins.
The products being dropped have low or falling sales and are used by about 68,000 diabetics. They will have until the end of the year to find replacement insulins, as inventories of the Lilly products are used up.
“We are just interested in making this transition as smooth as possible for patients,” said Dr. Scott Jacober, a medical adviser in diabetes care for Lilly.
The Indianapolis drug maker will tell doctors, patients, medical groups, diabetes trade publications and others that it is deleting Lente and Ultralente formulations of Humulin and its regular and NPH forms of Iletin pork insulin.
The two Humulin formulations, which have seen a 70 percent drop in sales the past four years, are used by about 66,000 people, Lilly spokeswoman Marni Lemons said.
The Iletin brands are purchased by just 2,000 people and Lilly suspects that “a significant number of them” are buying the products for their diabetic dogs or cats, Lemons said.
Iletin was Lilly’s original brand name for insulin when it was introduced in the 1920s. It is the last insulin Lilly sells that is made the old-fashioned way, by mashing the pancreas glands of livestock.
Lilly is the last U.S. seller of animal insulin. It phased out its mixed beef-pork Iletin in 1998.
The number of diabetics using the newly discontinued Lilly insulins amount to 2 percent of the 3.5 million insulin users in the United States.
Biosynthetics began to replace animal insulins in 1983, when Humulin hit the market. Unlike animal insulins, the biosynthetics are made with human DNA and are structurally the same as insulin the body produces.
Over the past six years, a handful of animal insulin activists have called on Lilly and other large insulin producers to keep selling animal insulins.
They say some animal insulin users lose the ability to sense lows in their blood sugar when they take biosynthetic insulins. That puts the patients in danger of passing out or lapsing into a coma, say the activists, who include the British consumer group Insulin Dependent Diabetes Trust.
“In the medical literature there really is very little support for that notion,” said Dr. John Buse, director of diabetes care at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Buse said he doesn’t think any of the 1,000 patients in his practice use the products Lilly is dropping. “People kind of voted with their feet” and turned to newer products, he said.
The two dropped Humulin formulations were approved for U.S. sale in the mid-1980s and have lost market share to newer types of insulin, said Lemons of Lilly.
She said the four dropped insulins make up such a small percentage of Lilly’s total insulin sales of more than $2 billion a year that “there will be no impact on manufacturing or employment.” The two Humulin formulations were made at Lilly’s Kentucky Avenue campus. Lilly hasn’t produced Iletin recently and was selling from stockpiled inventory, she said.
The discontinued products are not sold abroad, Lemons said.
Once supplies of the Lilly Iletin dry up, the only way someone in the United States will be able to get animal insulin is to import it from abroad, which requires permission from the Food and Drug Administration.
DISCONTINUED
Eli Lilly and Co. is dropping four products used by 2 percent of the nation’s insulin-dependent diabetic patients. They are:
–Humulin Lente. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1985. Used by 44,000 patients.
–Humulin s Ultralente. Approved by the FDA in 1987. Used by 22,000 patients.
–Iletin pork regular and NPH. Purchased by 2,000 customers, a significant number of whom use the insulin on their pets.
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