Toronto — Canadian diabetics can now get a long-awaited form of insulin that keeps baseline glucose levels more even with a once-a-day dose, eliminating the need for an overnight injection to prevent a dangerous drop in sugar, doctors say.

Lantus is the first long-acting, or basal, insulin to provide daylong glucose-lowering effects without the peaks and valleys of earlier long-acting insulins. The drug, made by Sanofi-Aventis, has been available in Europe and the United States for several years, but is only now coming on the market in Canada.

Dr. Stewart Harris, a diabetes specialist at the University of Western Ontario, called Lantus “a really outstanding insulin” for helping both type 1 and type 2 diabetics to manage the juggling act of insulin and food to keep blood-glucose low — without having it dip too low.

“It is a drug that should help us do a better job in working with our patients to try to keep their blood-sugar levels as close to normal as possible,” Dr. Harris, a spokesman for the Canadian Diabetes Association, said Wednesday from London, Ont. “And therefore, by doing that, you reduce the risk of complications.”

For Canada's estimated 2.2 million diabetics, those long-term complications include heart attack and stroke, kidney damage, vision loss and nerve damage that can lead to limb amputation.

With the most commonly used basal insulin, which is injected before bedtime, blood-sugar hits a peak, then begins dropping, sometimes hitting a level far too low, Dr. Harris said. To avoid being awakened in the night by the need for another injection, diabetics often take less insulin or eat a snack to keep glucose counts slightly elevated.

The problem with that, said Dr. Harris, is that maintaining low blood-sugar over time is critical in preventing those disabling or deadly complications.

Vancouver lawyer John Bromley, 47, was so tired of being awakened in the night with the symptoms of low blood-sugar, or hypoglycemia, that he has been crossing the border to Washington state every three months over the last two years for a supply of Lantus.

The low blood-sugar “would wake me up or it would wake my wife up because I would be vibrating because I was low, and I would be shaky and I would be perspiring,” said Mr. Bromley, who has had type 1 diabetes for 22 years.

Lantus has meant a major boost to his blood-sugar control, said Mr. Bromley, who was paying $75 (U.S.) for a month's supply in Blaine, Wash. He bought it in Vancouver this week for about $70 Cdn.

“For my day-to-day life, it's given me better control, it's reduced the number of lows that I have at night and it's meant that I don't have the inconvenience of having to go to the States to get necessary medication,” Mr. Bromley said.

“I'm just very pleased that it's finally here — I don't know why it took so long to get here — but I'm pleased that it's finally available to Canadians.”

Lantus has been on the U.S. market since 2001 and in European countries even longer. Some have suggested that Canada's relatively small population and cost controls on drugs were behind the lag in getting it into pharmacies here.

But Joelle Sissmann, a spokeswoman for Sanofi-Aventis in Laval, Que., said it took time for the Paris-based pharmaceutical company to get the high-tech production of Lantus ramped up high enough to expand supply, even though Health Canada approved the product about two years ago.

Lantus will be more expensive than its forerunners, with a daily dose costing between $1 and $2, depending on the patient and the type of diabetes, said Ms. Sissmann. But she noted that just one dose is required, instead of the usual two.

Dr. Harris said that since Canada's Banting and Best discovered insulin about 70 years ago, the goal has been to make a product that mimics as closely as possible the hormone produced by a healthy human pancreas.

“And Lantus is another step in that process of perfecting an external source of insulin ... It gives us one more strategy to try and achieve the best diabetes care that we can for our patients in Canada.”