Empowered Patient Podcast Targeting Elevated Cortisol Seen as a Hidden Driver of Treatment-Resistant Type 2 Diabetes with Robert Jacks Sparrow Pharmaceuticals
Robert Jacks, President and CEO of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, identifies that an elevated cortisol level is a newly recognized cause of treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes. A significant portion of patients with diabetes who do not respond to standard treatments, including GLP-1 agonists, have underlying high cortisol. Sparrow has developed a drug designed to lower cortisol levels inside cells, directly addressing the underlying driver of the disease, and to be used as a complement to existing treatments. This concept of targeting cortisol-driven resistance could be extended to other conditions, such as treatment-resistant hypertension.
Robert explains, "I feel as though Sparrow has come full circle, actually, with the mechanism of our drug. Originally, we have a drug that targets HSD-1. We can talk about what that is, but it's involved in intracellular cortisol regulation. This was a class of drugs that was originally developed targeting cardiometabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes. And the drugs had some moderate efficacy, but they weren't well differentiated in a broad population and largely were just discontinued for commercial reasons."
"Our company was founded a number of years ago based on the idea that these drugs had real potential but hadn't been used in the right patient population. And that being the patient population with the disease that we know is driven by excess cortisol toxicity, because that's aligned with the mechanism, as I was mentioning. So we generated some really interesting data in a rare disease called Endogenous Cushing syndrome. This is a very severe orphan disease with patients who have very severely elevated cortisol, showing in fact that yes, this mechanism does seem like it could have a very major impact in the right patient population."
"Simultaneously, another company published some data showing that actually there's a very large population of people with treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes, a very high level of medical need, and that their underlying disease actually is being driven by elevated levels of cortisol. And so when you bring together the data that we generated and what appears to be a large amount needed in a large population, it seems like we may have the perfect solution for that. So we've refocused our efforts on a broad population of treatment-resistant type 2 diabetes in patients whose disease is being impacted or driven by elevated cortisol levels."
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