Once Weekly Insulin: The Battle of 52 versus 365

The ever-growing global diabetes burden is an uphill battle for drug manufacturers. Insulin serves as the go-to drug in the treatment of diabetes when all others fail. The development of this drug has matured with time into more purified human formulations from the older bovine and porcine preparations, as well as the newer available analogues, which give greater flexibility from ultra-short acting to long-acting basal formulations. Short or rapid-acting insulins predominantly focus on the prandial sugar spikes, while the longer-acting and basal insulins work on the fasting glucose levels. Prandial or short-acting insulins are administered with the number of meals taken; while the basal insulin is taken once daily, usually at bedtime and works for ≥24 hours. However, this still warrants the basal insulin to be taken every 24 hours. In this article, we focus on a newer formulation of insulin that is proposed to act for a week, thereby reducing the number of injection jabs considerably and contributing towards increased patient compliance. This would translate to better HbA1c reduction and curb the onset of both micro- and macro-vascular complications seen in diabetes.