Kiersten Combs Discusses Findings of the DAPA-HF Study in Population Without Diabetes

A compelling paradigm is forming in which dapagliflozin can be prescribed not only to prevent heart failure in people with type 2 diabetes, but also in the patients without diabetes, said Kiersten Combs, US vice president of Cardiovascular Metabolism at AstraZeneca.

Transcript

The focus of the presentations at this year’s American Heart Association meeting is how dapagliflozin can offer protection against worsening of heart failure even in patients who do not have diabetes. The initial results released in Paris [at the European Society of Cardiology] showed that these benefits were nearly identical in patients with and without diabetes. How have payers responded to these data?

We’re extremely excited about our presence here across our cardiovascular metabolic portfolio, but specifically, to your point, the DAPA-HF data and some cut analysis that we’re reading out here is quite compelling. To your point, both in what you see in the heart failure composite endpoint, a 27% relative risk reduction in non-diabetic patients and a 25% relative risk reduction in the diabetic patient. From a payer perspective, since we introduced this data in Paris, we have taken it and talked to many of our payers, and just as the scientific community has been extremely excited about this data, we are seeing the same positive response from payers.

The recent study in JAMA Cardiology shows that heart failure is increasing in the US population. How can the findings from DAPA-HF translate into a broad-based solution for at-risk patients?

I think not only in heart failure patients, but also when you look at the data that’s in DECLARE [DECLARE-TIMI] that shows in type 2 diabetic patients that we can prevent the hospitalization of heart failure. When you put those together, there is a really compelling paradigm shifting science that suggests that as this goes through the regulatory process, we could be in a place where Farxiga [dapagliflozin] can not only prevent heart failure in type 2 diabetics, but then also treat both in the diabetic and non-diabetic patient population.