are under active development worldwide amid a pharmaceutical industry “gold rush” to harness the medical and financial benefits of a tide of breakthrough weight-loss treatments.
The potential for these medications to become tools for treating a broad range of conditions, both related and unrelated to excessive weight, was underlined on Tuesday with theshowing that users of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy and Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic, can reduce the risk of, and other compounds in the emerging class of drugs which mimic the action of an appetite-suppressing hormone known as GLP-1, in treating conditions ranging from alcohol addiction to...
Bhaskar Bhushan, a cardiometabolic disease expert at Airfinity, said established players like Novo Nordisk and their up-and-coming rivals in an increasingly competitive market are eager to demonstrate broader benefits to their drugs as a way of shoring up, or grabbing, market share.: “If you take semaglutide, there is no other medicine quite like it at the moment.
But there is fierce competition to produce next-generation drugs which offer greater convenience, lower price and higher efficacy than the two market leaders in the shape of Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide and tirzepatide, which is the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s newly-launched Zepbound. Both drugs have been shown to result in weight loss of between 15 per cent and 22 per cent.
But it could still be years before such medications reach patients. In the meantime, the two market leaders are also looking to shore up their current dominance. The availability of semaglutide on the NHS as a weight loss treatment – under the name Wegovy – is currently limited at least in part due to limited evidence on the long-term cost effectiveness of the therapy. Semaglutide is approved for use on the NHS as Ozempic for diabetes.