(Bloomberg) -- Novo Nordisk A/S’s blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic cut patients’ risk of dying in a kidney-disease study, the latest research pointing to the medicine’s usefulness in a constellation of disorders. 

Patients with kidney disease caused by diabetes were one-fifth less likely to die of any cause during the study if they took Ozempic rather than a placebo, scientists said in the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday. Novo stopped the trial ahead of schedule last year after an early analysis showed how much the drug helped, sparking a $3.6 billion selloff in shares of kidney dialysis providers Fresenius Medical Care AG and DaVita Inc.

The findings add to evidence that Novo’s semaglutide — branded as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss — can help with a host of interrelated conditions around obesity. They will likely change the way kidney disease is treated, said nephrologist Brendon Neuen, director of kidney trials at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. 

“This is going to be huge news,” Neuen said. 

The results highlight the close relationship between kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and diabetes — and the “fatal consequences of this combination,” nephrologist Vlado Perkovic, provost at Sydney’s University of New South Wales, who helped lead the study, said by email. “The fact that semaglutide improves all of these and prolongs life in this population offers hope.”

Price Questions

Ozempic cut the risk of a range of bad health outcomes linked to kidney and heart disease by 24%, the Danish drugmaker said in March. Shares of dialysis providers first plunged last year after Novo halted the trial, then recovered when the broad benefits were less than some investors had hoped to see. 

The benefit to patients was about the same across kidney-specific and cardiovascular outcomes, the research team said in the NEJM. Details of the roughly 3,500-patient study are also being presented on Friday at a renal conference, the ERA Congress, in Stockholm. 

Novo is studying Ozempic and Wegovy in a range of disorders — from heart disease to osteoarthritis — in an effort to prove to insurers that they’re getting value for their money.

Read more: Why Weight-Loss Drugs Are Billion-Dollar Blockbusters: QuickTake

Friday’s results show that Ozempic can help patients who were already getting good treatment for their diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, said Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s development chief. 

“We have seen a lot of progress over the last, I would say, 20 years,” he said in an interview. “But on top of that we can then add semaglutide and still see a 24% risk reduction. That obviously excites us.”

Obesity often underlies a group of expensive and debilitating disorders that the American Heart Association refers to as cardio-kidney-metabolic syndrome.  

“Heart disease can cause kidney disease,” said Rahul Aggarwal, a cardiology fellow at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Kidney disease increases your risk for heart disease, and metabolic disease influences all of these as well.”

Aggarwal and colleagues showed in a study earlier this month that almost 90% of American adults have at least one risk factor for the syndrome, which accounted for more than 1 million deaths in the US in 2021. The same year, almost 200,000 Americans developed chronic kidney disease due to type-2 diabetes, according to data from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. Incidence has doubled since 1990. 

Read More: Novo’s Wegovy Will Bankrupt Health System, Senator Sanders Says

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.