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We’re inching closer to having the first-ever needle-free weight reduction drug.
That is because of Novo Nordisk, which expects a U.S. approval for its day by day pill for chronic weight management by the top of this 12 months. The corporate expects to launch it in early 2026.
The drug is the 25-milligram oral version of semaglutide, the lively ingredient within the Danish drugmaker’s popular weight reduction injection Wegovy and diabetes counterpart Ozempic.
Several drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk’s chief rival Eli Lilly, have been racing to develop obesity pills, which can help alleviate the provision shortfalls and issues accessing the injections in the marketplace. Pills are likely easier to fabricate than injections, and a few health experts hope they might be cheaper.
It could be too soon to say which pill will win the best share of the market. But one thing is evident: Novo Nordisk’s drug may have a head start.
Novo Nordisk’s Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Scientific Officer, Martin Holst Lange, sat down with CNBC to preview the corporate’s pill.
On some great benefits of the pill:
Lange touted the pill’s “unsurpassed” weight reduction, safety and tolerability profile.
The pill helped patients lose as much as 16.6% of their weight on average at 64 weeks, in accordance with results from a late-stage trial presented at a medical conference in 2024. That weight reduction was 13.6% when the corporate analyzed all patients no matter whether or not they stopped the drug.
The burden loss appears to be consistent with the injectable version of semaglutide (Wegovy), and barely higher than that brought on by an experimental pill from Eli Lilly in a separate phase three trial.
“I believe the information speaks slightly bit for themselves,” Lange said.
Lange later said a few of the company’s competitors expect their pills to be less effective than their injectable drugs, but “that is clearly not the case” for Novo Nordisk.
He also pointed to the “substantially lower” rates of patients who discontinued the treatment resulting from negative effects, when put next to competing drugs. But Lange said to take comparisons “with a grain of salt” since no head-to-head trials directly pit Novo Nordisk’s pill against other drugs.
About 6.9% of patients discontinued oral semaglutide resulting from negative effects, which were mainly gastrointestinal, in comparison with around 5.9% of those that took a placebo.
Meanwhile, 10.3% of patients who took the very best dose of Eli Lilly’s pill stopped treatment resulting from negative effects, compared with around 2.6% of individuals in a placebo group.
Lange also said Novo Nordisk’s pill could have a cardiovascular health profit. That is because semaglutide – particularly Wegovy – is the one injection in the marketplace with a longtime and approved cardiovascular profit.
Novo Nordisk last week said Wegovy cut the chance of heart attack, stroke or death by 57% versus Eli Lilly’s weight reduction injection Zepbound in a real-world comparison of the rival medicines in patients with obesity and cardiovascular diseases but not diabetes.
In a separate phase three trial called “SOUL,” Novo Nordisk’s oral semaglutide lowered the chance of cardiovascular-related death, heart attack and stroke by 14% in comparison with a placebo after 4 years on average in patients with diabetes and established heart disease, with or without chronic kidney disease.
On the pill’s dietary requirements:
Novo Nordisk’s pill is a peptide medication, while competitors like Eli Lilly’s treatment are small-molecule drugs.
Meaning patients have to take Novo Nordisk’s oral semaglutide within the morning on an empty stomach with not more than 4 ounces of plain water. They’re instructed to attend half-hour before eating, drinking or taking other oral medicines. Some analysts previously told CNBC that those dietary requirements might be a hurdle for certain patients.
But Lange called that “a theoretical concern” and pointed to evidence showing that it’s “not a real limitation.” For instance, he said patients were treated with the pill for as much as five years within the placebo-controlled SOUL trial and “even in that setting, we didn’t see this as a limitation.”
“Patients take that drug apparently without this limiting their life,” Lange said. “I believe that is a matter of, you stand up within the morning, you’re taking the tablet, then typically you’re taking a shower, you go to breakfast after which, in a short time, half an hour is gone.”
On how pills will fit within the obesity market:
Lange said injections don’t look like “a significant obstacle” to people taking obesity treatments, but acknowledged that there are some patients who do not like needles or produce other reasons for not wanting an injectable drug.
Novo Nordisk desires to give you the option to succeed in those people.
“If there’s a giant group of people that prefers an oral over an injectable, we would like to deliver that,” he said. “We prefer to deliver that, again, with the identical efficacy and safety profile.”
He said he can even envision patients starting on an injectable and switching to a different type of treatment to take care of their results: “You would switch to an oral, you may switch to a lower dose, you something that offers fewer [gastrointestinal side effects].”
Lange said that ability to transition to different treatments needs to be proven in a phase three trial, but “based on what we have seen up to now, that’s that optionality in our portfolio.”
He highlighted other oral and injectable drugs in Novo Nordisk’s pipeline, including amycretin. That treatment targets the identical gut hormone that Wegovy mimics, generally known as GLP-1, in addition to a pancreas hormone called amylin that affects hunger. Late-stage trials on amycretin will begin next 12 months, Lange said.
On meeting demand with supply:
Over the previous couple of years, injections from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly slipped into supply shortages resulting from skyrocketing demand. Those treatments are not any longer briefly supply, and Wall Street and the health and medical community hope that pills won’t encounter the identical issue.
Lange said producing enough of the drug to fulfill demand is “obviously key to us,” as Novo Nordisk desires to make sure that patients can proceed their treatment. He said the corporate is confident in having the ability to scale up manufacturing of the treatment.
Lange pointed to the corporate’s investments in increasing production capability over the past several years. That features a recent manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and a deal to purchase three Catalent manufacturing sites from Novo Nordisk’s parent company, Novo Holdings.
Lange said those investments will help with the provision of injectables, but “it definitely also goes to the oral lively ingredients which can be actually being produced within the U.S.”
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OpenAI is doubling down on health care innovation.
In a post on LinkedIn Tuesday, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil announced he’s making a recent initiative inside the company called “OpenAI for Science.” The bogus intelligence company will hire a small team of academics to construct “an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery,” Weil said.
“Paired with a small team of researchers, we would like to prove that AI models are able to speed up fundamental science—and speed up research everywhere in the world,” Weil wrote.
OpenAI for Science won’t exclusively work on health care, but Weil shared several examples of how AI has been used to speed up health-related and biological research in recent months. He mentioned Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts the structure that proteins fold into, in addition to OpenAI’s work with Retro Biosciences, amongst other examples.
“Scientific discovery improves every little thing from the standard of our day by day lives to national security to global GDP,” Weil said within the post. “Innovation is the rationale the US leads the world. Few domains hold as much promise for improving lives as science.”
The brand new scientific initiative comes after OpenAI touted GPT-5 because the “best model yet” for health-related queries. GPT-5, which rolled out last month, is OpenAI’s latest and most advanced large-scale AI model.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said a post on X health-related questions are considered one of the largest categories of usage for its ChatGPT chatbot.
GPT-5 is designed to proactively flag health concerns, ask relevant questions and generate more precise and reliable responses, OpenAI said in a blog post. Altman said in his X post that he hopes GPT-5′s health capabilities will “provide real service to people.”
“Health care is perhaps the world where there’s the strongest improvement of any category,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview last month.
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