New drug trial results suggest that a pill in the works leads to 13% weight loss in 12 weeks
Novo Nordisk’s weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are popular, and powerful. Like, really popular. So popular that they’re raising the GDP of the company’s native Denmark. So popular that food company executives are fearfully calling Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen to ask for advice because patients don’t want to eat. And now the company is teasing a pill that might be twice as powerful.
Novo Nordisk told investors that an early-stage drug trial found that an oral version of the drug amycretin leads to users losing 13% of their body weight after 12 weeks of treatment. Novo Nordisk stock was up more than 8% to a record high in Monday morning trading, at about $135 per share.
The study involved giving a pill code-named NNC0487-0111 to obese Japanese men at a clinic in Fukoka, Japan, and is still ongoing. Phase 1 trials like the one that produced the results that has Novo Nordisk bragging are very early in what could be a years-long process and much smaller than Phase II, III, and IV trials, — which are much larger and could lead to different results as different factors are considered.
But if things pan out, the new medication would effect weight loss twice as quickly as Wegovy, whose patients lose 6% of their weight in 12 weeks. That it’s a pill might also make it more palatable than Ozempic and Wegovy, which both must be injected.
Reuters reports that Wednesday’s stock move was enough to make Novo Nordisk, whose shares have already climbed 33% this year, more valuable than Tesla $TSLA and the 12th-most valuable company in the world.
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