Savvy Updates 8/10/26

In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic: 

• • Lilly beats estimates on resilient demand for injectable GLP-1 drugs
  • Meitheal Pharmaceuticals Announces FDA Approval of Garzulys Insulin
  • Trinity Biotec and Pharma Latch Partner for a Precision Drug Delivery System
  • BreakthroughT1D Scraped an Iceberg. Now What?

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News from T1Dto100

• • • Looking for Comments on Skin Issues and Adhesives
    • The new science of brain workouts, beyond Sudoku and crosswords
    • “Every bite of our food gets interviewed” by Neil Greathouse

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Lilly beats estimates on resilient demand for injectable GLP-1 drugs, widens gap with Novo by Mrinalika Roy & Mariam E. Sunny for Reuters.com, 5 August 2026.

The strong results are likely to reassure investors that demand for Lilly’s GLP-1 treatments remains resilient despite pricing pressure and intensifying competition from Novo, which launched an oral version of its Wegovy weight-loss drug in the U.S. earlier this year.

Read more: Lilly beats estimates on resilient demand for injectable GLP-1 drugs, widens gap with Novo

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Meitheal Pharmaceuticals Announces FDA Approval of Garzulys™ (insulin aspart-fsan) Injection Press Release by Meitheal Pharmaceuticals on BusinessWire.com, 30 June 2026.

Meitheal Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Chicago and focused on the development and commercialization of generic injectable medicines, biologics, fertility products and branded medicines, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Garzulys™ (insulin aspart-fsan) injection, a biosimilar to NovoLog^® (insulin aspart). Emerge Bioscience Pte. Ltd. holds the approved Biologics License Application (BLA) for Garzulys. Meitheal serves as the product’s U.S. Regulatory Agent and holds exclusive U.S. commercialization rights under its license agreement with Emerge.

Garzulys is a rapid-acting human insulin analog indicated to improve glycemic control in adults and pediatric patients with diabetes mellitus. Garzulys formulations are approved for both subcutaneous and intravenous administration.

Garzulys was developed through a collaboration between Tonghua Dongbao Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (“Tonghua Dongbao”) and companies affiliated with Meitheal. Tonghua Dongbao was responsible for drug substance development, Nanjing King-Friend Biochemical Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (“NKF”) was responsible for drug product development, Xentria, Inc. (“Xentria”) led the clinical development program, and Meitheal, serving as the U.S. Regulatory Agent, led the U.S. regulatory work supporting FDA approval. Emerge is the BLA holder and is responsible for key supply-chain activities associated with the product.

Read more: Meitheal Pharmaceuticals Announces FDA Approval of Garzulys™

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Trinity Biotec and Pharma Latch Partner for a Precision Drug Delivery System for diabetes, by Justin Eastzer @Diabe_tech, 5 August 2026.

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BreakthroughT1D Scraped an Iceberg. Now What? by Dan Heller for DanHeller.substack.com, 3 August 2026.

If you follow type 1 diabetes closely, you’ve probably heard that something sudden happened at BreakthroughT1D this summer. The T1D Fund, a subsidiary of BreakthroughT1D that invests in outside companies working toward a cure, had its board dismissed without notice. Governing documents were rewritten overnight. The largest donors in the field — families who have each given north of $100 million — found out after the fact, and at least one resigned in protest. There are open letters circulating, and a watchdog organization publishing on it, and a lot of speculation about who did what to whom.

To distill it as succinctly as possible, two things went wrong at once. The first is that the Fund drew enough internal concern that the above alterations were made (confirmed by the organization itself). And the second is that these actions caused major donors to walk.  We don’t know what those concerns were. What’s on the record is only what BT1D did about them. (BT1D is how BreakthroughT1D refers to itself. It should not be confused with BT1 — Beyond Type 1 — a separate organization with nothing to do with any of this.). That said, the Fund itself, and the money it has access to, remains intact (at the time of this writing). As such, the story is not over.

As for the donors that walked, the most visible is David Panzirer, a main trustee of The Helmsley Charitable Trust, a now-former board member of the T1D Fund and one of its original founders.  On June 18, 2026, Panzirer resigned from The T1D Fund. In his open letter, which I have seen (though is not on a public website that I’ve been able to find), Panzirer stated: “What Breakthrough did by firing the Fund Board with zero notice or transparency has alienated the 4 largest families in T1D all within 48 hours. Each family has committed well over $100MM to the cause. NOTHING will happen if we don’t all stand up and demand transparency.”

Read more: BreakthroughT1D Scraped an Iceberg. Now What?

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News from T1Dto100

• • Looking for Comments on Skin Issues and Adhesives

We have an excellent opportunity to provide feedback: What would you like adhesive manufacturers to do to improve the adhesives we have to live with on a daily basis?

Note: they don’t want to hear what is not working. Instead, they would like to hear what you would like them to design in device adhesives to make them work better for you.

This is your chance to be creative with design thinking. Please leave your “wish list” or “new adhesive design ideas” in Comments… I’ll be forwarding responses to a major healthcare multinational corporation… they are asking the right questions!

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• • The new science of brain workouts, beyond Sudoku and crosswords by Ariana Eunjung Cha for WashingtonPost.com, 6 August 2026

Emerging evidence suggests that only certain types of training produce meaningful benefits, and those benefits may differ between men and women.  Recently, neuroscience has identified a growing list of “brain fitness” activities that appear to help the brain: learning a language, playing music, walking, mastering a new skill.

A number of studies published over the past year have approached the question from different angles, all of which point in the same direction: Cognitive training may produce broader, measurable changes in the brain.

Bottom line: Blood tests showed that only the speed-training group showed favorable changes in Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers.The finding led researchers to a part of the brain that rarely enters public conversation: the cholinergic system, a network of cells that supports attention, learning and memory. The system naturally declines with age — about 2.5 percent per decade — but deteriorates much more rapidly in Alzheimer’s disease.  “Our theory is that speed-processing exercises stimulate the cholinergic system in a way that influences biological pathways involving tau and amyloid,” Hye Won Chai, the study’s lead author and a research assistant professor at Clemson University, said.

To read the original article: The new science of brain workouts, beyond Sudoku and crosswords

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• • “Every bite of our food gets interviewed” by Neil Greathouse