Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide-based drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, when combined have brought in roughly $25 billion through the first nine months of the year, making it the world’s top-selling medication.
Ozempic 2.0 is on the way, and it could be even more transformative
A new weight loss pill could come within months, and other experimental treatments with more potency are not far behind.
washingtonpost.com
Ozempic, and the class of weight loss drugs it has come to embody, has left its imprint seemingly everywhere: On the lives of millions of patients who’ve lost unprecedented amounts of weight. On grocery store shelves with new offerings explicitly catering to those taking the drugs. Even in the calculations of insurance companies studying the drugs’ effects on mortality. (Yes, there are Ozempic guides to Thanksgiving.)
For all the societal changes ushered in by GLP-1 drugs, their lofty price tags limit who can afford them. Many patients stop taking the medications after experiencing undesirable side effects. Others who could benefit have stayed on the sidelines because they don’t want to jab themselves.
A new wave of the medicine is coming that could be even more transformativefor human health: pills, more potent injectables and new compounds that might have fewer side effects or could be taken just once a month.
“With this newer generation of medications, we’re not just focusing on weight loss,” said David Lau, an endocrinologist and professor emeritus at the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine. “We’re talking about changes beyond what you see on the scale.”
Whether these next-generation treatments live up to that promise isn’t assured. They haven’t yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which has warned consumers about unauthorized versions advertised on the internet. And it is common for the FDA to identify new risks after approving drugs, as it has done in recent years with the current GLP-1 blockbusters.
Such is the potential of these future offerings that Eli Lilly, by some measures the most dominant company in the weight loss field, reached a stock market value on Friday exceeding $1 trillion — the first company in the health care sector to hit that milestone.
Here is a look at what’s ahead, with analysis from obesity researchers who have led key clinical trials and who also have received fees from pharmaceutical companies related to their work.
Next-generation pills
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are both preparing to launch once-a-day weight loss pills by next year if the FDA approves them, as is widely expected. That would allow patients to avoid the jab of auto-injector pens with tiny needles.
“Some people are afraid of using needles and giving themselves injections,” Lau said.
Pills don’t require refrigeration — which adds cost and complexity to shipping and storing injectable medications — and there are signs that their price tags will be lower.
“What Henry Ford did with the car wasn’t to make a better car. He just made more of them and made them more accessible,” said Sean Wharton, a physician-researcher in Toronto and the lead author of two New England Journal of Medicine papers on oral GLP-1 drugs published in September. By offering more convenience at a lower cost, he said, these pills could do something similar for weight loss.
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