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Shares in Novo Nordisk, one of Europe’s largest listed companies, slumped on Monday after the company said that one of its diabetes drugs had failed to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s in late-stage trials.
Data from two large-scale clinical trials studying the effectiveness of treating early Alzheimer’s with semaglutide did not show any significant improvement in the thousands of patients enrolled in the study, the company said.
Novo said the trials, which enrolled nearly 4,000 patients, did not “translate into a delay of disease progression”.
The company’s shares were down almost 10 per cent on Monday.
The trial tested whether Novo’s older diabetes drug Rybelsus — which contains semaglutide, the same active ingredient as weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic — could lower the rate of cognitive decline in patients by at least 20 per cent.
All of the participants in the trial, which included patients from almost 40 countries, already had a build-up of amyloid protein on their brain scans, an early hallmark of Alzheimer’s.
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