How the Approval of Semglee Impacts Insulin Affordability, With Diana Isaacs, PharmD, and Lucia Novak, CRNP

Although it has been 100 years since the discovery of insulin, the cost burden on patients has remained the subject of discussion surrounding insulin for decades. Now, many are hopeful the community may have just witnessed a historic turning point in the battle to improve insulin affordability when insulin glargine-yfgn (Semglee) became the first interchangeable biosimilar product to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in the organization’s history.

An insulin product deemed to be both biosimilar to and interchangeable with its reference product insulin glargine (Lantus), a long-acting insulin analog marketed by Sanofi Pasteur, the July 2021 approval was hailed as a “momentous day” for patients using insulin by Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, MD. The next greatest hurdle in the eyes of many clinicians is the dissemination of this information both among colleagues and patients using insulin.

For more on the impact of this approval and how it might alter the landscape of insulin affordability, Endocrinology Network reached out to Diana Isaacs, PharmD, a clinical pharmacy specialist and remote monitoring program coordinator at the Cleveland Clinic Diabetes Center, and Lucia Novak, CRNP, a nurse practitioner and co-executive director of Capital Diabetes and Endocrine Associates. That conversation is the subject of the following video and the second installment in the “Insulin for All? How Recent Developments Impact Insulin Affordability” feature series.