United Nations experimental weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly & Co. produced the best results of any treatment to date, another boost to the company’s efforts to tame the burgeoning obesity drug market.
The obese patients they lose an average of 24.2% of their body weight, about 58 pounds, with the highest dose of the drug after 48 weeks, according to a study published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine. A quarter of those given the highest dose lost 30% or more, the company-funded mid-stage trial revealed.
“We haven’t seen results like this before in a trial of less than a year’s duration with an anti-obesity drug,” said Ania Jastreboff, the study’s lead author and director of the Yale Obesity Research Center.
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Lilly is struggling to take the lead in a market for weight-loss therapies that is projected to reach $150 billion by 2031. Rivals are Wegovy’s maker, Novo Nordisk A/S, along with Pfizer Inc., AstraZeneca Plc and Amgen Inc.
Lilly’s Mounjaro, a diabetes drug the company plans to sell for weight loss, mimics hormones called GLP-1 and GIP. In a previous study, it helped obese patients lose an average of 21% of their body weight; those who received the highest dose of the drug lost an average of 22.5%.
The next step in the arms race, retatrutide mimics a third hormone called glucagon, with the goal of stimulating patients’ energy use without increasing appetite. Trials at later stages will be needed to confirm the data.
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best so far
Retatrutide “seems like possibly the best GLP-1-based drug so far,” Daniel Drucker, a University of Toronto researcher who has done crucial work on gut hormones, said in an interview. Doctors see the drugs as “the start of a new era that I think will rival bariatric surgery” for weight loss, he said.
Retatrutide also improved blood sugar control in people with type 2 diabetes, lowering levels in some patients to the normal range, according to a presentation at the American Diabetes Association conference in San Diego, California. And in a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease study, it reduced liver fat by 70% in at least 80% of participants taking higher doses.
The late-stage study will last up to 80 weeks to assess maximum weight loss, Jeff Emmick, Lilly’s senior vice president of product development, said in an interview. Late-stage trials will also study the impact for people with osteoarthritis and sleep apnea, so that the drug’s approval can apply to multiple indications at once, he said.
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