PREVIEW-Takeda new diabetes drug seen good but not great

By Edwina Gibbs

TOKYO, June 5 (Reuters) - A drug candidate critical to Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd's (4502.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) mainstay diabetes franchise is expected to show sufficient promise to gain approval but may not be much better than a rival medicine from Merck & Co (MRK.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

Takeda's drug, called alogliptin or SYR-322, is under regulatory review and data will be presented at the American Diabetes Association's annual meeting, which runs from June 6-10.

Japan's largest drug maker has grown globally on the strength of its diabetes pill Actos, which has annual sales of more than $3 billion but will lose U.S. patent protection in 2011.

With alogliptin, which belongs to a new class of diabetes drugs called DPP-4 inhibitors, Takeda hopes to not only compete with Merck's drug Januvia, the only DPP-4 on the U.S. market, but also offset some of the drop-off in Actos sales that will come with generic competition.

Abstracts of the data have been released, prompting most Tokyo-based analysts to tentatively pronounce alogliptin to be roughly the same as Januvia in terms of safety and efficacy.

For some analysts, it is less than exciting.

"In terms of efficacy, it seems to be only about the same as Januvia. Since it's going to be the second drug to market in this class, it would have been nice to see greater efficacy," said Hiroshi Tanaka, an analyst at Mizuho Securities.

Januvia had sales of $272 million in the latest quarter, on track to become a billion-dollar blockbuster product.