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Photo of hand with glucose monitor showing 5.5 reading above it.

The TriMaster patient preference study results were presented on Wednesday December 7 2022 at the 2022 IDF World Diabetes Congress in Lisbon, Portugal, with two papers published simultaneously in eNature Medicine.

TriMaster was a randomised double-blind, three-way crossover trial run by the MASTERMIND consortium, a collaboration between the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Dundee. It was performed by Exeter NIHR Clinical Trials Unit and 24 hospitals throughout the UK, including the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (OCDEM) Clinical Research Unit.

People with type 2 diabetes received three different second or third line once-daily glucose-lowering drugs (pioglitazone, sitagliptin and canagliflozin), and it was the first trial to allow people to choose their own medication after trying three different drugs in succession. It showed that allocating therapy based on individually preferred drugs, rather than giving everyone the overall most preferred drug, would result in more people achieving the lowest HbA1c for them (70% vs. 30%) as well as the fewest side effects (67% vs. 50%).

Professor Rury Holman from the Diabetes Trial Unit, who led on the Oxford contribution to the trial,  said "This precision medicine trial supports the use of simple routinely available clinical measures to identify the type of drug most likely to deliver the most effective glucose lowering for a given person with type 2 diabetes."