January 16, 2025 — This will be an interesting year for drug pricing, especially for obesity medicines – if you can even figure out what is really going on with them. It appears that list prices for Ozempic (semaglutide), Mounjaro (tirzepatide), and Zepbound (also tirzepatide) have all gone up this year. The Wegovy (semaglutide) list price did not change. […]
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 Unfortunately, little or none of that is reflected in new draft guidance from FDA, issued yesterday for public comment, on developing the next generation of […]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 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 23, 2024 — FDA is working hard to push drug companies to get more diversity into the clinical trials that are the foundation for bringing new, safe, and effective drugs into the market. In June, the agency issued guidance for diversity action plans to improve the representation of marginalized populations. But unfortunately, it has nothing to say about […]
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 […]
September 4, 2024 — If nothing else, the ESC (European for Cardiology) Congress in London this week made one thing clear – everyone in mainstream medicine is now ready to claim the disease of obesity. Cardiologists all over the world are adopting a view we’ve been espousing here for decades. Obesity is not a lifestyle. Not a behavioral problem. […]
August 27, 2024 — How big might the semaglutide budget bomb be? The authors of a new brief report in Annals of Internal Medicine today are making a point. How threatening can we make this sound? Right up front in their title, they label their estimates as the “maximum costs of expanded Medicare coverage of semaglutide for cardiovascular risk […]
August 9, 2024 — This week has given us a study in contrasts. The leading makers of obesity medicines, Lilly and Novo Nordisk, posted quarterly reports and received sharply different responses. When Novo Nordisk released their report on Wednesday, the market value of the stock plunged by eight percent. The next day, Lilly reported results and saw its market […]
July 27, 2024 — It’s been a rough month for investors in Lilly and Novo Nordisk – largely because of the prospects for rising competition to their wildly successful obesity medicines. Accelerating VK2735 This week, Viking Therapeutics announced they are accelerating development of injectable form of VK2735, a dual agonist that works on both GLP-1 and GIP receptors. This […]
