WHO adds GLP-1 diabetes treatment to essential medicines list

The World Health Organization has added GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes to its essential medicines list, alongside treatments for cystic fibrosis and cancer, and said it hopes this will improve global access to the costly drugs.

The list, consisting of 523 medicines for adults and 374 for children, is a catalogue of the drugs the WHO believes should be available in all functioning health systems.

In the past including a drug, for instance, HIV treatments in the early 2000s, has helped to ensure access for people in poorer countries.

“Rather than letting price be a disqualifying factor, the committee views inclusion in the essential medicines list as a potential catalyst for access,” Dr Lorenzo Moja, head of the WHO secretariat overseeing the list, told Reuters.

The expert committee added the active ingredients in Novo Nordisk’s NOVOb.CO Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s LLY.N Mounjaro to the list, to treat type 2 diabetes in conjunction with established cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease or obesity.

The drugs were initially developed for diabetes but have also become hugely popular weight-loss drugs, under different brand names.

The WHO stopped short of adding them to treat obesity alone, as it also did in 2023.

The committee said this decision provided clear guidance on which patients would most benefit from the therapies.

“High prices of medicines like semaglutide and tirzepatide are limiting access to these medicines,” the WHO statement added, saying that encouraging generic drugmakers to produce the product would also help when patents begin to expire on the drugs next year.

Globally, more than 800 million people worldwide were living with diabetes in 2022, the WHO said. There are also more than 1 billion people with obesity.

Earlier this year, a WHO memo said it would recommend the use of the drugs for obesity, a separate step to adding them to the essential list.

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