September 13, 2011, 03:45:00PM. By Lucy Campbell

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London, UK: A higher rate of cancers occurring in diabetics who use Amylin Pharmaceutical's Byetta or Novo Nordisk's Victoza (Liraglutide) will be the subject of a debate among researchers and clinicians at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes conference being held in Lisbon, Portugal this week.

The debate has been prompted by a database review of side effects for the GLP-1 analogues which found that patients taking Byetta and a Merck & Co drug had a six-fold increased risk for pancreatitis which raises the risk for tumours. The research was led by Robert Elashoff of the University of California at Los Angeles.

According to a report on Bloomberg the researchers said in their study, which was published in the journal Gastroenterology in July, that the GLP-1 drug class “could have serious unintended and unpredicted side effects.” They analyzed reports from 2004 to 2009 in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s adverse event database and found that pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer were more common among patients who took sitagliptin and exenatide, which is sold by Merck as Januvia, as compared with other therapies to treat Type 2 diabetes.

The debate is widely anticipated to be a highlight of the meeting, because GLP-1 analogues are widely prescribed, and regulators are already aware of possible links between this class of diabetes medication and pancreatitis and thyroid tumors. Some suspect that the renewed debate could prompt regulators to require additional safety data from manufactures before approved GLP-1 analogues for market.

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