Boehringer Ingelheim is tapping consumer health chain Walgreens to conduct a large-scale Phase III clinical trial in obesity and type 2 diabetes, the companies announced on Thursday.
The strategic collaboration will make use of certain Walgreens community pharmacies as clinical trial sites, allowing patients to participate “within the familiar and accessible environment of Walgreens pharmacies,” according to the announcement. The partnership aims to optimize recruitment and make clinical trials “more accessible, inclusive and equitable.”
Boehringer Ingelheim will also collaborate with EmVenio Research, a provider of decentralized trial solutions, to provide patients with more participation options through mobile research units.
Lennart Jungersten, senior vice president of medicine and regulatory affairs at Boehringer Ingelheim, in a statement said that the company is “proud to embrace this community-centric approach to clinical research,” which will allow the pharma to reach more patients living with overweight and obesity.
“By bringing clinical trials into the heart of local communities, we’re making them more accessible, helping to provide access to diverse populations with pressing health needs to participate in our clinical trials,” Jungersten said.
Though the partners did not name the specific obesity program that they will work on, Yahoo! Finance reported that the community-focused clinical trial is Walgreen’s first large pharma partnership and will focus on Boehringer Ingelheim’s survodutide, an investigational dual agonist of the GLP-1 and glucagon receptors. This mechanism of action allows survodutide to trigger two key gut signaling cascades, which could make it more effective than current single-hormone analog treatments, as Boehringer Ingelheim looks to challenge Novo Nordik and Eli Lilly in the lucrative weight-loss drug market.
Boehringer Ingelheim is developing survodutide in collaboration with Zealand Pharma under a 2011 partnership, which gives the German pharma the responsibility over all R&D and commercialization activities for survodutide with Zealand remaining eligible to milestones and royalties.
In May 2023, Boehringer Ingelheim launched five Phase III trials to assess survodutide as a weight-loss treatment. This program includes SYNCHRONIZE-1 and SYNCHRONIZE-2, which will test the candidate in overweight and obese participants without and with type 2 diabetes, respectively.
The pharma is also running SYNCHRONIZE-CVOT, which will focus on overweight and obese patients with cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease or other risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
In June 2023, Boehringer Ingelheim released Phase II data showing that survodutide could cut body weight by around 20%. At the time, however, weight loss in the study had not yet plateaued, suggesting that survodutide could show even greater efficacy at longer follow-ups.
The pharma in February 2024 reported that survodutide could elicit significant biopsy-proven improvements in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis without worsening fibrosis.
