December 29, 2022 — Very quietly, just before Christmas, FDA approved a major step forward for treating obesity in teens. The agency issued an approval for Wegovy brand of semaglutide to treat obesity in teens. There was no press release at FDA, none on the corporate website for Novo Nordisk. As late as yesterday, the news of this approval […]
December 10, 2022 — In a perverse way, there might be some good news in the current frothy coverage about new medicines for obesity and diabetes. We are a bit fed up with nonsense about who “deserves” access to care with drugs like semaglutide. But it does serve to highlight some of the usually hidden biases about treating obesity. […]
November 7, 2022 — There’s a clue in the strained supply of new obesity and diabetes meds that most everyone is missing. For more than a year now, Novo Nordisk has been unable to produce and distribute an adequate supply of semaglutide in the form of Wegovy for the treatment of obesity. This has knock-on effects. So supply of […]
November 3, 2022 — Mind-blowing. That’s how pediatric obesity medicine expert Claudia Fox described the outcomes with semaglutide for teens with obesity at OW2022 yesterday. As she and a panel of experts in the field discussed this huge advance for teens with obesity, every seat and space to stand in the ballroom was taken. Daniel Weghuber presenting these results […]
October 31, 2022 — One of the themes you will hear when ObesityWeek gets underway tomorrow in San Diego is the dramatic progress that’s coming into view with new obesity drugs. But the picture quickly becomes murky in the real world because of issues with supply and access to these new and improved obesity meds. The access to care […]
September 3, 2022 — ICER – the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review – has released its final report on the effectiveness and value of obesity meds and set a public hearing for September 16. Let’s say it right up front. This private nonprofit is trying to do something that is almost impossibly hard. Making objective sense from the […]
August 4, 2022 — Sometimes the hardest news to digest is no news. This was certainly the case yesterday for Novo Nordisk, the market leader in anti-obesity medicines. Their stock dropped by nearly 13 percent when the company told investors that there would be no news on the semaglutide SELECT study. So why was no news seemingly such big […]
July 14, 2022 — We’ve all got our reading assignments. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) has released its draft report on effectiveness and value for the current options in obesity medicine. There’s a lot to process in there. But the bottom line is clear enough. Phentermine/topiramate (Qsymia) offers the best value, says the report. The most […]
May 24, 2022 — Drug pricing has been getting a lot of attention for some time now, so it’s no surprise that the prices of obesity medicines would get attention, too. New medicines are coming, competition will be increasing, and one factor in that competition will be prices. The only way to get good value is to consider both […]
May 21, 2022 — Competition can be a great thing. In the past few weeks we’ve been hearing a lot about tirzepatide. The FDA just approved it for treating type 2 diabetes, hailing it as an important advance. Tirzepatide for obesity is a couple of years away, but the initial results of pivotal studies have been extremely impressive. So […]
