Havana – Cuban medical researchers said Wednesday that they have found the only effective solution to date for treating advanced diabetic foot ulcers and avoiding the lower-limb amputations that are often required.
The director of commercial development at the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center, Ernesto Lopez Mola, said at a press conference that the institute’s international patent for its drug CITOPROT-P had been accepted by Australia, Singapore and South Africa for treatment of the condition.
He said that the development of the product focused on patients with category 3 and 4 ulcers, the most severe on the Wagner scale.
“There is no alternative to CITOPROT-P in the world at this time,” he said, adding that the treatment includes ulcers with neuropathic and ischemic origins and had a 56 percent success rate in patients treated in Cuba.
Lopez Mola said that no estimate has been made yet as to the likely price to be set for the drug on the market, but soon it would be in use at all Cuban hospitals to treat end-stage foot ulcers.
The director of the center, Luis Herrera, said that researchers and doctors were hoping to conduct promotion of the product in several European countries, Canada and the United States – where a patent has already been applied for – to obtain authorization for the product, a process that could take about two years.
According to Cuban scientists, about 200 million people around the world suffer from diabetes and some 15 percent of them eventually develop progressively worsening ulcers – often on the extremities – at some stage of their illness. Of those, 15 percent must undergo amputation to treat the life-threatening problem.
Herrera said that the pharmacy and biotechnology sector is at this time the Cuban economy’s “first or second-biggest non-traditional sector” in terms of revenues, adding that since 1982 about $3 billion has been invested in it.
