March 11, 2025 — Drug development is tricky. If you want evidence for just how tricky it is, a quick look at the experience with CagriSema will give you a pretty good idea. Yesterday, Novo Nordisk announced topline results of this drug from their REDEFINE 2 clinical trial. Their press release talked about “superior results” for people with overweight […]
February 27, 2025 — More than a decade ago, targeting amylin receptors for treating obesity looked like hot opportunity. Amylin, a peptide hormone co-secreted with insulin by pancreatic beta cells, plays a role in regulating satiety and food intake. An amylin analog, pramlintide, gained FDA approval for treating diabetes. But efforts to develop it for treating obesity never quite […]
January 25, 2025 — The race to innovate beyond semaglutide and tirzepatide for obesity can be utterly confusing. More than a hundred new drugs are in various stages of development and analysts expect more than a dozen to be launched within the next five years. But right now, all we have are tantalizing – and sometimes disappointing – results […]
January 8, 2025 — Drug development for obesity may well be in a golden age. In large part, this is because the scientific understanding of obesity has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Unfortunately, little or none of that is reflected in new draft guidance from FDA, issued yesterday for public comment, on developing the next generation of […]
November 27, 2024 — Yesterday, Amgen released topline data on their remarkable monthly obesity medicine – MariTide or maridebart cafraglutide. To us, the results are impressive, albeit preliminary. In 52 weeks of study, patients with obesity or overweight lost approximately 20% of their initial body weight and even after a year, they appeared to still be losing weight. For […]
November 9, 2024 — The wild ride that has been 2024 in the market for obesity care is not quite over yet. If you want to know exactly how wild this ride has been, take a moment to digest the results that the two leaders in obesity – Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk – have posted. The sales Lilly […]
September 12, 2024 — The obesity buzz of the day at EASD annual meeting is clearly amycretin. Amycretin is a new oral medication under study for obesity that activates both GLP-1 and amylin receptors. The excitement came because this is the first public presentation of clinical data on amycretin. This news is impressive on two counts. First, the dosage […]
September 9, 2024 — The American College of Clinical Pharmacology is meeting in Bethesda this week. On the opening day, ACCP convened a symposium to address critical questions about how drugs work in people with obesity. What can we – industry, FDA, and scientists – do better? Because all too often, drug labels to guide safe prescribing are effectively […]
July 13, 2024 — Barely seven months ago, business reporters were telling us Pfizer had decided to “drop,” “stop,” “can,” or “pull the plug” on danuglipron – an oral small molecule for obesity. But as we pointed out at the time, they missed the real story. Pfizer was shifting its gears to focus on a once daily form of […]
June 6, 2024 — On the opening day of the EASL Congress in Milan, we got a peek at more details on the results of the phase 2 study of tirzepatide in MASH (metabolic dysfunction associated steatohepatitis). The study, called SYNERGY-NASH, will be the subject of a late-breaking presentation on Saturday at the meeting. But the release of the […]
