A block­buster cock­tail? Gilead slides No­vo Nordisk's semaglu­tide in­to new NASH triple ther­a­py

In case you didn’t get the memo, Gilead is bet­ting that a cock­tail ap­proach will win them a cov­et­ed place in the NASH show­down.

A day af­ter draw­ing at­ten­tion to pos­i­tive proof-of-con­cept da­ta around its cilofex­or/fir­so­co­stat ther­a­py, the Big Biotech says it’s kick­ing off an­oth­er clin­i­cal tri­al in col­lab­o­ra­tion with No­vo Nordisk in which semaglu­tide will be added to form a three-drug reg­i­men.

A block­buster fa­vorite among up-and-com­ing di­a­betes drugs, semaglu­tide is a GLP-1 ana­logue that not on­ly stim­u­lates se­cre­tion of in­sulin but al­so is thought to im­prove glu­cose me­tab­o­lism in the liv­er and in­crease fat­ty acid ox­i­da­tion. Giv­en that more than 40% of NASH pa­tients have di­a­betes and more than 80% of them are al­so liv­ing with obe­si­ty (No­vo Nordisk’s num­bers) — an­oth­er tar­get in­di­ca­tion for semaglu­tide — the Dan­ish drug­mak­er has called its in­ter­est in the dis­ease a “nat­ur­al ex­pan­sion.”

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