The daily pill, like Ozempic, can work for weight loss and blood sugar
A daily pill can be just as effective in people with type -2 diabetes to lower blood sugar as the popular injectable medication Mounjaro and Ozempic.
The drug, Orforlipron, is a GLP-1, a class of medication that has become blockbusters due to their weight loss effects. But the GLP-1 on the market is now expensive, must be kept and injected. A pill that delivers similar results has the potential to become more widespread, although it is too expensive.
Lilly said it would get the approval of the Food and Drug Administration later this year for marketing Orforlipron for obesity and in early 2026 for diabetes. Industry analysts expect the medication to receive approval at some point next year and ultimately become a big blockbuster. Eli Lilly is not expected to announce a price for the medication after it has won the approval.
“What we see is a struggle for the future of the obesity market,” said Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at Northwestern University.
The company announced a summary of its results on Thursday in a press release, since pharmaceutical companies are necessary after receiving study results that could affect their share price.
But Lilly did not leave the underlying data from his attempt, and the results they have unveiled were not examined by external experts. The company said it would present detailed results in a meeting of diabetes researchers in June and publish them in a diary assessed by experts.
The clinical study comprised 559 people with type -2 diabetes who took the new pill or placebo for 40 weeks. In patients who O1C, a measure of blood sugar levels over time, decreased by 1.3 to 1.6 percent. Ozempic and Mounjaro achieved similar results in non -related studies. In 65 percent of the people who took the new pill, blood sugar levels fell into the normal area.
The patients with the new pill have also lost weight – an average of £ 16 for patients who take the highest dose. Her weight loss was similar to Ozempic, but a little less than with Mounjaro in non -relatives.
Side effects were the same as with the injectable obesity medication – diarrhea, digestive disorders, constipation, nausea and vomiting.
It is possible that the advantages of a much larger number of patients, if the medication is used in a much larger number of patients, could be smaller and the side effects could be worse.
Eli Lilly is facing a small pack of companies that race races to develop GLP-1 pills. There were great concerns that such pills could cause hard side effects that prevent patients from taking them. At the beginning of this week, Pfizer said that it decided to stop developing such a pill after a test participant had experienced a “potential medication -induced liver injury”.
But in Eli Lilly's attempt, Orforglipron showed no adverse effects on the liver.
Eli Lilly's share rose to the encouraging data. It closed by 14 percent on Thursday and increased the company's market value $ 100 billion.
This was the first of seven main clinical studies by Orforlipron to report the results. Some of the others test the drug for weight loss in humans without diabetes. The results in patients with obesity are expected later this year.
If the drug for obesity and diabetes is approved, Dr. Daniel Skovronsky Lillys Chief Scientific Officer is confident that it will have sufficient amounts of the pills to satisfy demand. He said he learned the results of the diabetes on Tuesday morning without knowing them without knowing them, the company prepared supplies.
“In the coming decades, more than 700 million people around the world will have type -2 diabetes and over a billion obesity,” said Dr. Skovronky. “Injections cannot be the solution for billions of people around the world.”
Twelve percent of American adults state that they have taken a GLP-1. About 40 percent of the Americans are obese, and more than 10 percent have diabetes, most of which have type 2, according to the centers for the control and prevention of diseases.
The most popular injectable drugs that are already on the market on the market are produced by Eli Lilly, which sells his medication as a zepbound for obesity and mounjaro for diabetes, and Novo Nordisk, which sells his medicine as a wordovy for obesity and Ozempic for diabetes.
Since the demand for these drugs has increased in recent years, the balms have met employers and government programs who had to deal with increasing prescription drugs. Orforlipron is now ready to expand the market and worsen the strain on its budgets.
In a way, the existence of OFLIPRON is a triumph of modern chemistry. The injectable GLP 1 medication are peptide-small fragments of proteins. (GLP stands for glucagon-like peptide.) Peptides are digested by the stomach. In order to produce an oral GLP-1, chemists had to find a way to make a non-peptide that looks like a peptide. Researchers of Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., a Japanese company, found a way out and licensed their medication in 2018 to Lilly.
The solution was to find a small molecule-thousandth of the size of a peptide, which in the protein, which is the destination for GLP-1, sinks into a tiny bag. When it sinks into the pocket, the protein changes the shape, as the case is when a GLP-1 binds to the entire protein.
Dr. Skovronsky said the little molecule, said Dr. Skovronsky, “The Holy Grail”.
The result-a pill that can be taken with or without food at any time of the day-is almost unknown in the world of peptide medication. Insulin, probably the most common peptide medication, has been around for more than a century. It is still only injectable, although the scientists make intensive efforts to make an insulin pill. So is the human growth hormone. Medicines for the treatment of a variety of diseases, including arthritis and cancer, are.
Novo Nordisk has a GLP-1 pill, Rybelsus, but it contains the GLP-1 peptide, so it has to be taken in large doses and is not as effective as the injections, since most of it is digested.
In patients with diabetes and patients who have to deal with obesity, a pill that can replace an injection can be transformative for several reasons.
On the one hand, it can make treatments attractive to those who cannot bear injecting themselves.
Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, Professor of Medicine in Harvard and Chief Academic Officer in the Joslin Diabetes Center of Harvard, said that he had many patients who hesitated to give Ozempic or Mounjaro.
A pill, he said, “would definitely be preferred by most people.”
Dr. Sean Wharton, director of the Wharton Medical Clinic in Burlington, Ontario, has a broader hope. Dr. Wharton, who included patients in Lilly's study on Oneforglipron for obesity, said that a pill could possibly bring GLP-1 treatment to under-sized population groups around the world.
“It can easily be made in a factory and shipped everywhere,” he said. It should earn much less than peptides and does not require packaging in special injection pens. It does not have to be kept.
At the moment, the medication is only available to a small part of the people who have insurance cover or can afford to pay them out of their pockets. Only rich countries had access to them.
It starts to change: Eli Lilly recently launched his injectable GLP 1 drug in India. The patients there would generally have to pay the equivalent of around 200 US dollars a month for the medicinal product, a price for most people in India. As soon as Ozempic and Wegovy from Novo Nordisk become generic in some countries next year, if not in the United States.
With Orforlipron “we have the chance that millions and millions of people will be given a medication,” said Dr. Wharton.
But that depends on Eli Lilly and how it decides to praise and distribute his medication.
“That's why I emphasize the word” chance “, said Dr. Wharton.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk now offer their injectable drugs Zepbound and Wegovy for 500 US dollars per month for patients in the USA who pay with their own money instead of going through insurance. Employers and government programs that cover most of the GLP-1 costs for Americans pay similar prices as soon as considerable discounts are taken into account, although the exact prices are secret.
If pharmaceutical companies announce the price of a medication, they announce the sticker price that is the starting point for price negotiations. Hardly patients pay this price. Several Wall Street analysts stated that Eli Lilly would set a sticker price below 1,000 US dollars for OFLIPRON, less than the sticker prices of Zepbound ($ 1,086) and Wegovy ($ 1,349).
Since Orforglipron is so far ahead of the other GLP-1 pills that are developed by other pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly is expected to have a monopoly on the category for a few years. This would give the company more influence to keep its prices higher.
Orforglipron Weltwid have to prices for the task when the company is expected in the United States. The injectable GLP 1S medication can already be bought in pharmacies in Europe for much less. President Trump has long complained that the United States pays much more than other wealthy countries for the same drugs.
