A phase III clinical trial of efpeglenatide is set to begin on Dec. 4 with 400 type 2 diabetes patients enrolled to demonstrate the superiority of once weekly injection of the investigational drug in comparison to placebo in glycemic control, according to the U.S. federal website ClinicalTraials.gov on Tuesday.
Efpeglenatide originally developed by South Korea’s Hanmi Pharmaceutical Co. was out-licensed to multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi in November 2015. The investigational drug is a new GLP-1 analogue, applied with LAPSCOVERY, a long acting delivery technology that enables a peptide or protein to extend its half-life from weekly to monthly.
Hanmi Pharm shares jumped more than 5 percent on the news Tuesday morning.
By Kim Hye-soon and Minu Kim
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