If you or someone close to you lives with type 2 diabetes, you probably know that doctors spend a lot of time talking about blood sugar.
But the biggest everyday danger is often not the sugar itself. It is what diabetes slowly does to the heart and the blood vessels.
Researchers at Michigan Medicine now think they have found one reason a newer diabetes pill may lower the risk of heart attack and stroke.
The drug, sotagliflozin, appears to calm the blood cells that form clots.
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The finding was published in October 2026 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Sotagliflozin, the active ingredient in Lexicon Pharmaceuticals' Inpefa, was approved by the FDA in 2023 to treat heart failure in adults, including people with type 2 diabetes.
It belongs to a class called SGLT inhibitors.
Why sotagliflozin stood out from a similar drug
The team compared sotagliflozin head to head with empagliflozin, another SGLT inhibitor sold as Jardiance.
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Both drugs block the same sugar transporter, called SGLT2. But sotagliflozin also blocks a second one, SGLT1, which sits mainly in the gut.
In mice with injured blood vessels, sotagliflozin cut clot formation by roughly 60 percent. Empagliflozin cut it by only 5 to 10 percent.
The researchers also tested blood from healthy donors and from people with type 2 diabetes and saw the same calming effect on platelets, the tiny cells that stick together to form a clot.
In the Michigan Medicine write-up of the study, co-senior author Eugene Chen said the dual action was the key.
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"These experiments showed that sotagliflozin has a unique effect, and blocking SGLT2 alone is not enough to inhibit platelet aggregation," Chen said, according to Michigan Medicine.
Importantly, the researchers reported that normal clotting still worked.
The drug did not appear to raise the risk of bleeding, which is the trade-off that has long haunted blood thinners.
What this means for people living with type 2 diabetes
Diabetes is one of the most common chronic conditions in the US.
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According to the CDC, the risk of dying from heart disease is higher in adults with diabetes than in adults without it.
SGLT2 inhibitors are already a core treatment for type 2 diabetes and for heart failure. Michigan Medicine estimates that more than 1 in 5 people with type 2 diabetes already take an SGLT2 inhibitor.
Sotagliflozin is the only drug on the US market that blocks both SGLT1 and SGLT2 at once.
The findings do not mean patients should ask to switch drugs. The experiments were run in mice and in blood samples in the lab, not in a large human trial that measured heart attacks and strokes.
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The researchers point to the clot-calming effect as a possible mechanism, not as proof that one SGLT inhibitor saves more lives than another.
The team has said they plan to study the drug's effect in other patient groups, including people with chronic kidney disease and atrial fibrillation. Anyone weighing a change in diabetes medication should raise it with their own doctor before acting on new research.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.