Drug companies race to develop weight-loss drugs | Wilnesh News

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Good afternoon! Some drugmakers are rushing to capitalize on one of the next big innovations in the booming weight-loss drug market: weight-loss pills that are effective, convenient and potentially affordable.

Most weight loss and diabetes drugs now come as weekly injections, such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly and Company’s Zepbound and Mounjaro. These drugs, which are GLP-1 agonists, have surged in popularity over the past year.

Now the pair and other drugmakers such as Pfizer hope to develop oral weight loss and diabetes drugs that are more convenient for patients to take and easier to produce at scale. This could help alleviate supply shortages plaguing existing injectable therapies in the U.S.

Pills are also generally less expensive than injections, but it’s not clear whether this is true for oral weight loss pills.

Novo Nordisk has low-dose oral semaglutide (the active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic), which is expensive $968.52 per month Before insurance and other rebates. The pill, sold under the brand name Rybelsus, is approved for diabetes treatment. All injections currently cost about $1,000 per month.

Pfizer said Thursday it is still developing a weight-loss drug after a series of setbacks last year. The company said it will progress Danuglipron, a once-daily oral weight loss drug, is undergoing more research to determine the ideal dose.

Pfizer disappointed investors last year scrapped Twice-daily danuglipron and another oral obesity drug called lotiglipron.

But Pfizer’s once-daily danuglipron is still in the early stages of development. It’s unclear whether the company will commit to a late-stage study of danuglipron, which it needs to conduct before applying for regulatory approval.

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk lead the race.

Eli Lilly is developing an oral GLP-1 called orforglipron that can help patients lose 14.7% of their body weight after 36 weeks. mid-term trial, compared with 2.3% of those taking a placebo. Eli Lilly has previously said it expects late-stage trial results for orforglipron to be available in 2025.

Meanwhile, Novo Nordisk last year launched Phase III trial resultsIts high-dose oral version of semaglutide is designed to control weight. After 68 weeks, the drug helped patients lose an average of about 15% of their body weight.

The company said at the time that it planned to apply for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2023.

Novo Nordisk also touted in March data Another experimental weight loss drug called doxorubicin helped people lose 13.1% of their body weight after 12 weeks in early trials. Results from the mid-stage trial are not expected until 2026.

Myringin suppresses appetite by targeting the same gut hormone that Wegovy mimics, called GLP-1. But amylin also targets a pancreatic hormone called amylin, which affects hunger.

Here are some other drugmakers developing oral drugs to treat obesity, diabetes, or both:

Please feel free to send Annika any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data: annikakim.constantino@nbcuni.com.

In the first half of 2024, U.S. digital healthcare startups raised US$5.7 billion through 266 transactions. Report Found out Monday from Rock Health. If this pace continues, the number of deals and amount raised could exceed the 2019 and 2023 totals. $10.7 billion raised.

Rock Health said the “pandemic-driven funding cycle” of 2020 to 2022 remains difficult to compete with. Investors flocked to healthcare companies during the market boom, with financing peaking at $29.2 billion in 2021.

Rock Health said Series A activity has been particularly strong in the first half of the year, although seed and Series B rounds are also popular. Seed, Series A and Series B rounds accounted for nearly 85% of all tagged rounds during the period, the report said.

The company refers to financing rounds that do not have a public name, such as Series A rounds, as “unlabeled rounds.” Startups often raise unlabeled rounds to avoid valuation cuts and advance challenging markets, though they usually don’t avoid difficult conversations forever.

Rock Health said the overall percentage of unlabeled digital health deals peaked at 55% in the fourth quarter of 2023 and declined to 47% and 33% in the first and second quarters of 2024, respectively.

“This weakening may signal the beginning of our return to a ‘more normal’ pace of tag increases,” the report said.

Many Return on Health readers may have guessed what’s coming next: Artificial intelligence has attracted investor attention to a number of early-stage digital health companies in the first half of this year. Nearly 40% of all digital health companies raising Series A funding used artificial intelligence, and 34% of the industry’s total funding went to companies deploying the technology in some way.

The ground may also be thawing in the digital health IPO market, which has not seen any public listings in nearly two years. Medical payment software provider Waystar and precision medicine company Tempus AI went public in June, and pregnancy monitoring company Nuvo went public through a SPAC in May.

Rock Health said the exit activity reflected a slight uptick in IPOs in the broader market.

All in all, “early detection is increasing, the proportion of unlabeled deals is gradually decreasing, and the digital health IPO market is showing early signs of life,” the report said.

We’ll have to see what happens the rest of the year.

Please feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Ashley at ashley.capoot@nbcuni.com.