Interaction of esomeprazole with insulin detemir and human albumin: A potential cause of hypoglycemia.

Insulin detemir (IDt) is long-acting insulin whose protraction mechanism is based on a covalently attached fatty acid to an insulin molecule. Utilizing the high affinity of fatty acids towards human serum albumin (HA), the modified detemir molecule binds with good affinity to HA, which functions as a reservoir that leads to a slow and prolonged release of insulin. However, questions were raised over potential interactions between other drugs and IDt through competitive binding on the binding site(s) of HA.