Business Operations

What is Lilly Diabetes President Mike Mason’s goal for people living with diabetes? The simple answer is to improve and simplify diabetes management so people can focus on living the life they want.

Forward-looking: Today, more than 537 million people across the world are living with diabetes. That’s why Mason and his Lilly Diabetes team are continuing to develop more innovative insulin and non-insulin medicines to help transform diabetes care.

Lilly has played an important role in improving diabetes care for close to a century, starting with manufacturing and bringing to market the first commercial insulin, lletin, in 1923. Since then, there has been incredible innovation in insulin, shifting from animal-based insulin to recombinant DNA human insulin to today’s more modern analog insulins.

• “Thanks to a century’s worth of scientific advancements and discoveries, I am proud that we can meet the diverse needs of people with diabetes in ways we only dreamed were possible,” Mason said.

More to be done: Still, only about half of people with diabetes are achieving their blood sugar goals—leaving them at higher risk for long-term cardiovascular disease and other diabetes-related complications.

• For Lilly, that means keeping a “relentless focus” on the improvement of diabetes treatments and solutions, Mason said.
• “Importantly, delivering breakthrough treatments is just the start of what we do. Lilly is deeply committed to doing what we can to ensure everyone who needs our products can access them,” he added.
• Lilly offers a variety of affordability solutions through patient support programs and copay assistance across the major products of its portfolio. People with diabetes can contact the Lilly Diabetes Solution Center to learn about affordability solutions that best match their needs.

What’s coming: Lilly’s vision for the future is to maintain a relentless focus on raising the innovation bar for diabetes treatment, as well as in other serious metabolic conditions, including obesity, NASH and heart failure, to name a few.

• “Our diabetes pipeline includes a once-weekly injection, currently under review by the FDA that represents a new class of medicines to treat type 2 diabetes,” Mason said. “In clinical trials, this therapy significantly lowered glucose levels and body weight—and even helped many participants reach a non-diabetes glucose range.”
• “Our hope is to revolutionize how metabolic conditions are understood and treated, hopefully changing the way people manage conditions like type 2 diabetes and others,” he added.

Manufacturing support: Diabetes innovation is ultimately made possible by the people who work tirelessly to make life-saving medicines.

• “I’ve witnessed our team start with an extraordinary idea and determine the science to make it possible, and it’s our manufacturing team that brings these products to fruition,” Mason said. “Our talented and dedicated manufacturing teammates make delivering life-saving medications to people with diabetes possible.”
• Even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lilly employees in essential manufacturing and research jobs came to work each day “to make vital medicines for the world.”

 The last word: Lilly is “in an exciting period of growth,” Mason said, noting a recent announcement from the company that it planned to invest $1 billion in a North Carolina site to create an injectables-manufacturing facility.

The investment “underscores our commitment to delivering innovative medicines to patients around the world,” Mason said. “And it taps some of the brightest minds from the local labor force to bring it to life.”