Replies to post #119526 on Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

How is pre-diabetes being defined in these calculations?

[DewDiligence]

The 2006 article in #msg-13297601 is apropos to this thread. Worth a reread, IMO.

[DewDiligence]

Diabetes-Device Market Will Reach $24B in 2017, Says Market Researcher

[The $24B number is just for the devices, not the drugs.]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Diabetes-Device-Market-to-iw-1545148736.html?x=0&.v=1

›Tuesday May 24, 2011, 9:08 am EDT

ROCKVILLE, MD--(Marketwire - 05/24/11) - MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of Business Insights's new report "The Diabetes Device Market Outlook to 2017," to their collection of Diseases & Conditions market reports. For more information, visit http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?ProductID=6207072

The global diabetes care devices market was valued at $16.2 billion in 2010 and is forecast to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6% to reach $24.3 billion in 2017. The increasing prevalence of diabetes globally, especially in the fast-developing economies of India and China will be the main growth driver in the near future.

Glucose monitoring devices which are widely being adopted by patients in emerging economies are forecast to grow at a CAGR of 5% to reach revenue of $12.1 billion in 2017. The insulin delivery devices market which was valued at $7.6 billion in 2010 is forecast to grow at CAGR of 7% to reach value of $12.1 billion in 2017. Artificial pancreas can see widespread adoption in the near future. Problems with devices and product recalls will lead to greater safety standards enforced by FDA.

It is estimated that by 2030, 7 out of the top 10 countries for diabetes populations will be based in Asia. The main contributors to the growing number of diabetics will be India and China. China is said to have an estimated 92.4 million adults with diabetes as compared to 50.8 million people in India, according to the International Diabetes Federation based in Brussels.

According to Dr Yang Wenying, head of endocrinology at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, a combination of increasingly elderly populations, rapid urbanization, and nutritional changes along with lack of physical activity are the main reasons behind this growing epidemic of diabetes in China. In India too, growth in income levels and development has led to an increasing sedentary lifestyle and increasing diabetes prevalence at 3.7% of the population and 1.4 million new cases per year, 90% of which have Type 2 diabetes.

The global diabetes care devices market is dominated by Roche Diagnostics and followed by Lifescan (Johnson and Johnson group of companies), both accounting for 23% of the global market. Roche's Accu Chek line of products has driven the growth for the company in 2009, followed by the One Touch brand of products by Lifescan. Novo Nordisk and Elli Lilly have been the market leaders in insulin pens, and as pens become widely adopted in developing countries their revenues are set to exceed their present values of $1.2 billion. [According to NVO, insulin pens have a higher penetration rate in emerging markets than they do in the US (#msg-63134722).]

Medtronic is one of upcoming players in the market with its MiniMed line of products for insulin administration; its revenues reached $955m in 2009 on account of robust sales of its insulin pumps in North America and Europe. Abbott Laboratories has increased its presence in the emerging markets by acquiring the Nicholas Piramal business in India. With strong growth in the number of diabetic patients and increasing patient affordability in Asia, in the near future companies will increase their presence and market their products aggressively to drive growth.‹

[DewDiligence]

NVO Boosts China Investments to Fend Off Sanofi

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-01/novo-will-boost-china-investments-to-fend-off-sanofi-coo-says.html

›By Frances Schwartzkopff - Jun 1, 2011

Novo Nordisk A/S will boost investments in China to preserve its dominance in the world’s largest market after rival Sanofi made a new foray amid an effort by the government to improve health services.

“We don’t fear any competition,” said Kaare Schultz, chief operating officer for Bagsvaerd, Denmark-based Novo, the world’s biggest maker of insulin.

Novo produces two-thirds of the insulin used in China, where the latest study shows one in 10 people have diabetes [#msg-48221898),]. Sanofi said last month it will train 10,500 doctors and experts in diabetes care as part of a Ministry of Health-led program to curtail the disease’s spread.

Novo will respond by boosting its presence as needed across all aspects of the market, from sales people to production to patient care, Schultz said yesterday in a phone interview. It won’t make acquisitions, he said.

“You will see more manufacturing. You will see more education,” he said. “You will see more training of patients. You will see more research locally.”

The Chinese market is growing in importance for drugmakers [duh] as its economic growth supports greater investments in health care while U.S. and European providers look to cut costs. Last month, Novo said it probably won’t be able to raise prices in the U.S. as much as in previous years as health-care providers demand greater rebates from drugmakers.

Chinese sales grew at a faster rate in the first quarter than any other region, Novo reported April 28. Revenue rose 34 percent to 1.38 billion kroner ($267 million) compared with overall sales growth of 15 percent.

Amputations

The Chinese diabetes drug market will climb fourfold by 2015 to more than $2.8 billion from $642 million in 2009, the International Market Analysis Research and Consulting Group said in a September report. More people are moving from rural areas to cities, changing their lifestyles and eating habits and triggering a rise in obesity rates, IMARC said.

Being overweight or obese significantly increases the risk of contracting diabetes, a condition marked by rising levels of sugar in the blood. When untreated it may result in heart and kidney problems and blindness and may require amputations.

Novo’s share of the Chinese market, by value, fell after Paris-based Sanofi introduced its 24-hour insulin Lantus in 2004, according to IMS Health Inc. figures which Novo provided at its capital markets day last month. Novo’s share of synthetic insulin [i.e. insulin analogs] dropped from about 70 percent in 2006 to 53 percent five years later, the figures show.

Market Share

“That is due to the fact that Lantus has been launched at a very high price point,” Schultz said. Looking at the volume of insulin sold, “we have not lost market share, and we are still at a very, very high level.”

A 2009 report by the International Diabetes Federation estimated that 4.2 percent of China’s mainland population had diabetes. Researchers reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine last year pegged the figure at 9.7 percent, and called for additional measures to prevent and treat the disease.

About 8.3 percent of the U.S. population and 6.6 percent of the global population has diabetes, according to estimates by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the IDF.

Novo started operating in China about 15 years ago when Novozymes A/S, the listed enzyme maker that then was part of the Novo group, entered the market. In 2002, Novo created a diabetes research center, in 2007 it established a foundation with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and this year it’s expanding its insulin packaging plant there to become the world’s largest.

Sanofi created a research clinic in 2005 which it expanded three years later, set up a trial-development center and signed a partnership with the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences to develop medicines for diabetes, cancer and neurological diseases.‹

[DewDiligence]

Global Diabetes Epidemic Balloons to 350 Million

[70% of worldwide diabetics live in emerging markets—see #msg-52402577.]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/25/diabetes-epidemic-idUSN1E75N1VI20110625

›Jun 25, 2011
By Kate Kelland and Deena Beasley

LONDON/SAN DIEGO, June 25 (Reuters) - The number of adults with diabetes worldwide has more than doubled since 1980 to 347 million, a far larger number than previously thought and one that suggests costs of treating the disease will also balloon.

In a study published in the The Lancet journal, an international team of researchers working with The World Health Organization found that rates of diabetes have either risen or at best remained the same in virtually all parts of the world in the past 30 years.

The estimated number of diabetics is markedly higher than a previous projections that put the number at 285 million worldwide. This study found that of the 347 million people with diabetes, 138 million live in China and India and another 36 million in the United States and Russia.

The most common type of diabetes, Type 2, is strongly associated with obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.

"Diabetes is becoming more common almost everywhere in the world," said Majid Ezzati, from Britain's Imperial College London, who led the study along with Goodarz Danaei from the Harvard School of Public Health in the United States.

"Unless we develop better programs for detecting people with elevated blood sugar and helping them to improve their diet and physical activity and control their weight, diabetes will inevitably continue to impose a major burden on health systems around the world," Danaei added in a joint statement.

People with diabetes have inadequate blood sugar control, which can lead to serious complications like heart disease and stroke, damage to the kidneys or nerves, and to blindness.

Experts say high blood glucose and diabetes cause around 3 million deaths globally each year, a number that will continue to rise as the number of people affected increases.

As a result, diabetes is a booming market for drugmakers like Novo Nordisk (NVO), Sanofi (SNY), Eli Lilly (LLY) [those three comprise the insulin oligopoly], Merck (MRK) and Takeda.

TREATMENTS AVAILABLE

Dozens of diabetes treatments, both pills and injections, are on the market. Global sales of the medicines totaled $35 billion last year and could rise to as much as $48 billion by 2015, according to drug research firm IMS Health.

New research being presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego will focus on experimental drugs and ways to combine classes of medicines to better control blood sugar.

"This is a chronic, progressive condition," said Dennis Urbaniak, vice president of Sanofi's diabetes division. "What we are most worried about is the number of people out there with diabetes that is not optimally controlled."

For the Lancet study, the largest of its kind for diabetes, researchers analyzed fasting plasma glucose (FPG) data from 2.7 million participants aged 25 and over across the world, and then used advanced statistical methods to estimate prevalence.

They found that between 1980 and 2008, the number of adults with the disease rose from 153 million to 347 million. Seventy percent of the rise was due to population growth and aging, with the other 30 percent due to higher prevalence, they said.

The proportion of adults [worldwide] with diabetes rose to 9.8 percent of men and 9.2 percent of women in 2008, compared with 8.3 percent of men and 7.5 percent of women in 1980.

Diabetes has taken off most dramatically in Pacific Island nations, which now have the highest diabetes levels in the world, the study found. In the Marshall Islands, a third of all women and a quarter of all men have diabetes.

Among wealthy countries, the rise in diabetes was highest in North America and relatively small in Western Europe. Diabetes and glucose levels were highest in United States, Greenland, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the Netherlands, Austria and France. The region with the lowest glucose levels was sub-Saharan Africa, followed by east and southeast Asia.‹

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MRK, Simcere form Chinese drug-development JV:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Merck-and-Simcere-Sign-bw-4185591282.html?x=0&.v=1

The initial focus of the partnership will be branded pharmaceutical products for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Specifically, in the area of cardiovascular disease, the partnership will offer a combined portfolio of selected medicines from both companies, including ZOCOR® (simvastatin), COZAAR® (losartan) and RENITEC® (enalapril) by Merck/MSD, and XINTA (levamlodipine) and SHUFUTAN (rosuvastatin) by Simcere. In the metabolic disease area, the partnership will work to maximize access in China to sitagliptin, a DPP-IV inhibitor for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is increasingly recognized as a significant public health threat in China [#msg-48221898)].

…Mr. Zhijun Luo, secretary of China's Jiangsu Provincial Committee, presided over the signing ceremony.

[DewDiligence]

Glucobay Leads China Diabetes Market—For Now

[See #msg-64624716, #msg-48221898, and #msg-13297601 for related stories.]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-20/china-s-thirst-for-new-diabetes-drugs-threatens-bayer-s-lead.html#

›By Naomi Kresge
Nov 20, 2011 11:01 AM ET

There isn’t a word for diabetes in traditional Chinese medicine, but Chengzhi Xia knows it when he sees it. And he says he’s seeing much more of it these days.

Xia and other healers in affluent central Shanghai describe the disease by one of its symptoms, a raging thirst. Patients often seek relief from the side effects of modern drugs -- products sometimes outdated in the West.

“Western companies should have more innovative products to give Chinese patients more choices,” Xia said in an interview in his cubicle at Lei Yun Shang Pharmacy, where apothecaries sift sharp-smelling medicinal herbs alongside modern pills.

He may soon get his wish. As diabetes rates soar in China, drugmakers including Merck & Co., Sanofi and Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) are trying to unseat Bayer AG (BAYN) and Novo Nordisk A/S as the biggest providers of diabetes medicines. At stake is a market that may triple to $2.1 billion in annual sales by 2019 from $700 million in 2009, says Yifi Liu, an analyst for Datamonitor in Shanghai.

“You should continue to expect double-digit growth in China’s diabetes market for many years to come,” Kare Schultz, chief operating officer of Novo Nordisk, said in a telephone interview. The Copenhagen-based drugmaker is the country’s top seller of insulin, which diabetes patients lack to convert blood sugar into energy.

Beyond insulin, the pill to beat is a 17-year-old Bayer drug called Glucobay, little used in the West but dominant in China. Glucobay sales there surged 22 percent to 1.8 billion renminbi ($283.4 million) last year, according to Bayer. The medicine, now a generic, only garnered a fraction of that, or $9.7 million in revenue, in the U.S. in the first nine months of this year, according to data research firm IMS Health.

Eating Carbs

“We’re still winning market share” with Glucobay in China, Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers said at a Nov. 15 dinner with journalists in Shanghai.

The medicine, a so-called starch blocker intended to cut blood sugar after meals, is unpopular in the U.S. because it’s not potent enough to justify its side effects, according to Tom Donner, head of the diabetes center at Johns Hopkins University. Up to half of Glucobay patients experience loose bowel movements and many complain of gas, he said in a telephone interview.

Yet it’s a logical option for a population with a diet high in carbohydrates like that of China, said Datamonitor’s Liu. Combined with Bayer’s marketing savvy, that may help explain why the drug is so famous locally it has reached the status of “pharmaceutical myth,” according to Liu.

Proud Doctor

Bayer, of Leverkusen, Germany, worked with physicians and health authorities to help draft guidelines for diabetes treatment. The company held round-table talks on diabetes with influential doctors. It also set up Bayer Diabetes Community Center houses, where people can get free drugs and prevention literature and participate in patient activities, all under the auspices of the Bayer brand name, Liu said.

Bayer also kept prices low, making Glucobay an affordable option for a disease with few insurance-reimbursed therapies.

“The loyalty to the brand is very strong,” said Liu.

Even Xia, the traditional Shanghai doctor, proudly displays his Bayer glucose meter, an instrument to measure blood-sugar levels that he calls a preventive tool “for the future.”

The same pace of social change and urban prosperity that has fuelled China’s economy in the past decade has fanned the spread of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, as people ate fattier foods and led more sedentary lifestyles.

Long March

Type 2 diabetes linked to obesity affected almost 1 in 10 Chinese adults in 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine said in a study published last year. That would be a higher rate than in the U.S., where the National Institutes of Health estimates 8.3 percent of the population had diabetes in 2010. Another 148 million Chinese are on their way toward developing the disease.

The new generation of drugs that may relieve sufferers and supplant Glucobay has already begun its march into China.

Merck’s Januvia went on sale last year, and Novo’s Victoza became available in October. Lilly and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AMLN)’s Byetta won approval in 2009. All three work in different ways to prompt the pancreas to make insulin, the hormone that diabetics need to break down the sugar that builds up in their blood stream.

Bayer’s dominance, while under threat, probably won’t evaporate overnight. Next-generation drugs take about five to six years to penetrate the market, delayed by requirements for clinical testing inside China, according to Novo’s Schultz. Once the medicine goes on sale, demand tends to pick up only after it’s added to insurance reimbursement lists.

Dislodging Glucobay

“The sales are insignificant until we get on the reimbursement,” Schultz said. Until then, only the fewer than 10 percent of the population willing to pay out-of-pocket will be able to buy Victoza, he said.

Sanofi introduced its Lantus insulin in 2004. The French drugmaker said local sales had doubled in the third quarter of 2011 after the medicine was included in reimbursement lists in Shanghai last December and Beijing in July.

The first new therapies are likely to be added to insurance payers’ lists by 2013, according to Datamonitor’s Liu.

By 2016, newer classes of drugs will be the fastest-growing diabetes medicines in China, estimates Vineet Kashyap, an analyst for IMARC Group in New Delhi. Medicines such as Januvia, Victoza and Byetta are likely to hold 17 percent of the market by then, approaching the one-quarter share estimated for drugs in Glucobay’s class of starch blockers, Kashyap said.

Eventually, new drugs may come from within China. At the diabetes institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated 6th People’s Hospital, dozens of journal publications hang on the wall next to the office of director Weiping Jia, who led the Shanghai portion of the diabetes study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

‘Dramatic Change’

Ten years ago, Jia’s diabetes center saw about 70 patients a day. Now seven times as many travel from across the country for treatment or screening, she says. The center’s research has helped define two genetic variations that may play a stronger role in diabetes in Chinese populations than in Caucasians, according to Congrong Wang, one of the institute’s doctors.

“In the future, it’s possible that if we find a certain genetic background we can use a more individual therapy,” Wang said.

Mingzhao Xing, a professor of medicine, endocrinology and metabolism at Johns Hopkins, blames “a dramatic change in people’s lives” affecting diets, culture and medical care for the recent flare-up of one of the oldest disease known to man.

“In Chinese medicine 2,000 years ago, people knew urine could be sweet and people would be thirsty -- they knew the signs of diabetes,” Xing said. “But it wasn’t common.”‹

[DewDiligence]

China’s Diabetics Raise Stakes For Healthcare Reform

[See #msg-72248843, #msg-49465915, and #msg-54773617 for related info.]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/25/us-china-diabetes-idUSBRE82O04E20120325

›25-Mar-2012
By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - In 30 years, the Chinese people have gone from having barely enough to eat to worrying about spreading waistlines, leaving the healthcare system struggling to keep up with an exponential rise in "nobleman diseases" like diabetes.

The soaring cost of chronic disease could tax China's effort to offer basic healthcare to 1.4 billion people. Almost one out of every eight Chinese households was racked by catastrophic health expenses in 2011, according to a paper published in medical journal The Lancet.

Healthcare reform is needed to rebalance the economy, since Chinese salt away their savings in part because of fear of being wiped out by devastating illness.

But the burden of chronic illnesses could worsen as Chinese eat more and live longer. Diabetes, for instance, now afflicts nearly 10 percent of Chinese adults - roughly the same proportion as in the United States - up from 1 percent in 1980 [#msg-48221898].

"In the last 20 years, diabetes has developed a lot, but it's only now showing up in the medical system," said Dr Tong Xiaolin, vice director of the Guanganmen Hospital in Beijing, who sees dozens of patients during Monday office hours.

"People are now just flooding into the system in real numbers. The next 10 years will be a real drain on the system."

Spending on diabetes reached $17 billion in China in 2011, a tiny amount compared with the $465 billion spent worldwide, according to a white paper from Singapore's Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health.

That represents about 5 percent of total healthcare spending in China, with some estimates rising to 13 percent.

In the United States, where costs have ballooned, diabetes accounts for about $1 in every $10 spent on healthcare, according to the American Diabetes Association. Spending on diabetes at U.S. levels of $201 billion a year would swamp China's system, leaving it unable to tackle other priorities.

There are now about 92 million diabetics in China but that is expected to rise to 130 million by 2030.

"We were very surprised and couldn't believe how fast it grew," said Peking Union Medical College Hospital specialist Xiang Hongding, as he sipped coffee after a typical morning spent seeing 22 patients in four hours.

The rapid growth means diabetes often goes unrecognised until secondary symptoms appear, making treatment much harder.

Liu Yuxiang travels five hours to Beijing every month to see Dr Tong, and reckons she has spent 30,000 yuan ($4,700) on Chinese medicines to treat painful and swollen legs. Western drugs to control blood sugar cost her another 12,000 yuan a year, 80 percent of which is covered by insurance.

"If we didn't have a doctor in the family I would never have known. No one around us had any knowledge of it," said the cheerful 64-year-old, who suffered from years of thirst, fainting fits and hospitalization before her daughter-in-law suggested she might have diabetes.

Many doctors, especially in the countryside, have no inkling that diabetes could be the underlying cause for a number of symptoms -- including blindness, numb or tingling legs, digestive disorders and circulatory problems.

"Diabetes is very easy to diagnose, but even so, most doctors don't know how to do that," said Xiang, 68, who got his early medical training during China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution and now teaches rural doctors in diabetes diagnosis.

"The patients don't know, and when they get to us they say the doctors didn't know."

QUEUEING FOR CARE

A nationwide insurance roll-out, begun three years ago, makes people more likely to see doctors and makes treatment much more affordable. Almost nine percent of people stayed in a hospital in 2011, from less than four percent in 2003, the study published in The Lancet showed.

Basic medicine to keep diabetes under control is relatively cheap in China, at about 2,000 yuan ($320) a year.

But treatment for a patient who has developed advanced symptoms could easily reach 18,000 yuan a year, roughly equal to the average yearly income of urban Chinese.

Common drugs for diabetes are covered by insurance, but equipment for at-home testing and monitoring of blood sugar levels - which can reach 400 yuan a month - is not.

Adding to the burden, Asians in their prime earning years of 30-50 are more likely to develop diabetes than Caucasians, according to the Saw Swee Hock white paper on diabetes.

"When I found out, my heart was very heavy. I worried I wouldn't be able to support my family. I was afraid I couldn't function in this economy," said patient Wang Yuanqing, father of an 8-year-old, whose diabetes weighs heavily on him even though he has kept it under control since his diagnosis a year ago.

Catching diabetes early could help drug makers like Novo Nordisk, the top seller of insulin in China, or Bayer, which markets a drug that helps reduce glucose absorption after meals. Both help educate on diabetes in China.

Traditional Chinese medicine developers could also benefit. Guanganmen Hospital's Tong Xiaolin has received more than 9 million yuan in government grants to study how Chinese medicine can offer lower-cost, effective treatment of diabetes complications.

"Traditional Chinese medicine has a real role to play in treating complications," he said, as patients trooped through his office. He consulted records handwritten in blue notebooks, while nurses prepared the next patient in line.

"Chinese medicine is very helpful in controlling nausea, or depression due to pain. Some patients are in such pain they can't sleep and consider suicide," Tong said.

Better education of doctors and patients, and standardizing Chinese medicine dosages, could also reduce reliance on the "quack" medicine that proliferates in the teeming communities that ring China's mega-cities.

Even if diabetes treatment is normalized, doctors acknowledge that the announced government healthcare spending of nearly $175 billion through to 2015 is only the beginning.

The Ministry of Health has a pilot programme to cover some chronic diseases, which may be extended to dialysis, the treatment for kidney failure that can stem from diabetes.

"At the moment actually there is no real appreciation of how much medical reform will cost. But the nation is committed, even if the cost is high, to resolve the problem," said Xiang.

"We're a socialist country, if the government wants to get something done, it can." ($1 = 6.3227 yuan)‹

[DewDiligence]

Diabetes Continues to Spike in China

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/04/us-diabetes-china-idUSBRE83317H20120404

[The proportion of adults in China with T2D is now thought to be as high as 13% (!). The abstract of the study cited in this newswire is at http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2012/03/13/dc11-1212
. See #msg-64624716 and #msg-72213242 for related stories.]

›Apr 4, 2012 4:23pm EDT
By Kerry Grens

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The more common type of diabetes in China grew by 30 percent in just seven years, according to a new survey of thousands of Shanghai residents.

The curse of affluence appears to be affecting China as it has many other developing countries.

"There is a certainly a pattern that we're seeing over and over again," said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, the vice president for global health at Emory University.

People with type 2 diabetes have trouble processing sugar in their blood, but do not generally require insulin to manage the condition. As countries become more wealthy, lifestyle factors associated with type 2 diabetes -- such as weight gain, less healthy diets and less physical activity -- tend to become more common.

"Unlike the gradual transition in most Western countries, these changes in China have occurred over a very short time," the researchers, led by Dr. Rui Li at the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, write in their study in the journal Diabetes Care.

The research team interviewed more than 12,000 people in 2002 and 2003. They asked whether the participants had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and they screened people for diabetes who had not been diagnosed before.

They found that 9.7 percent of people had diabetes.

The researchers surveyed about 7,400 people again in 2009, and found that 12.6 percent of people had the disease.

"That's a remarkable increase in seven years," Koplan told Reuters Health.

The spike was even more dramatic among the rural residents in the study -- going from 6.1 percent to 9.8 percent, a 60 percent increase.

According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, 8.3 percent of Americans have diabetes.

REASONS FOR INCREASE UNCLEAR

In 2010 China surged to the head of the pack in terms of countries with the most diabetic residents, with 92 million.

The study did not pinpoint the causes of the rise in diabetes, and Koplan said he could only speculate on what's to blame.

He said that it's been well documented that people are getting wealthier and heavier in China and diets are including more saturated fat [no kidding].

He also said people are becoming more dependent on cars and less inclined to walk or ride a bike.

"All these factors would help contribute to having an increased prevalence in type 2 diabetes," said Koplan, who did not participate in the research.

The authors write in their study that an aging population in China likely explains some of their findings.

Older people are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, and the researchers note that 20 percent of Shanghai residents are over age 60, with that proportion increasing.

Koplan said many countries have programs to promote healthy lifestyles and prevent type 2 diabetes, but as of yet there's "not a proven documented intervention that can reverse this epidemic of obesity and epidemic of type 2 diabetes."‹

[DewDiligence]

NVO expands in China:

http://www.novonordisk.com/press/news/news.asp?sShowNewsItemGUID=25fccf0e-50a0-4b71-9ecd-b90ea44a87ee&sShowLanguageCode=en-GB

As the first multinational company to open a research centre in China in 1997, Novo Nordisk now reaffirms its long-term commitment to the country by investing an additional 100 million US dollars to expand its state-of-the-art science facilities in Beijing.

The new 12,000m2 centre will make it possible to increase the number of science employees from the current 130 to 200, with extra space available to accommodate additional future growth.

…The site in Beijing has already contributed significantly to the company’s research and development portfolio in both diabetes and biopharmaceutical target disease areas. The new, expanded facility will enable even stronger contributions from the science team in China across the range of Novo Nordisk’s protein technology, biology and pharmacology research activities.

Remember: 10% of adults in China are diabetic (#msg-48221898).

[DewDiligence]

More on China's diabetes epidemic:

10% of adults in China are diabetic, so there’s a really big upside here for somebody.

That is astounding (given that they still have a ways to go to catch up to the purchasing power of the US and diabetes is a "lagging index").

The actual figure is 11.6%, according to a Bloomberg piece today in #msg-91658929.

[DewDiligence]

Graphic on projected diabetes growth in the US/China/India between 2013 and 2035:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/sunday/the-global-diabetes-epidemic.html



Please see #msg-81129518, #msg-74095289, #msg-64624702, and #msg-52402577 related stories.

[DewDiligence]

China has a health problem: #msg-149571636.