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Structure Therapeutics stock jumped 65% to $56 per share on Monday after the biopharmaceutical company released promising clinical trial results for its experimental weight loss pills. It’s the latest development in the race among several pharmaceutical companies to introduce new weight loss drug alternatives to the current market leaders Wegovy, Zepbound, and Ozempic.
A small clinical study found that patients taking a daily dose of Structure’s experimental weight loss pill GSBR-1290 lost a 6.2% placebo-adjusted average of their weight after 12 weeks. About 67% of patients taking the pill lost over 6% of their weight and about 33% lost over 10% of their weight.
A separate study testing a different formulation of GSBR-1290 showed that patients on this version of the pill lost a 6.9% placebo-adjusted average of their weight after 12 weeks.
“These topline results demonstrate the substantial weight loss effect of GSBR-1290 and its potential to become a best-in-class oral small molecule GLP-1RA as well as an ideal backbone for future combination therapeutics for the treatment of obesity and related diseases,” said Structure founder and CEO Raymond Steven in a press release.
The news comes as several companies including market leaders Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are developing weight loss pills to help with the skyrocketing demand of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic.
“Even if we take the combined supply of our [medications] and the competition, it’s not sufficient to meet the needs of 110 million Americans,” diabetes and obesity division president Patrik Jonsson told Quartz in an interview. It will likely take a GLP-1 pill to meet needs of the over 40% of American adults living with obesity, he added.
A small ongoing trial of the Novo Nordisk’s experimental weight loss pill amycretin demonstrated that it helped users lose an average of 13% of their body weight after 12 weeks.
And early trials of Eli Lilly’s pill, orforglipron, found that it helped users lose an average of nearly 15% of their weight after 36 weeks.
“By 2030, the global prevalence of obesity is expected to reach 1 billion,” said Ania Jastreboff, the director of the Yale Obesity Research Center in a statement. “There is a need for oral treatments, including small molecules, which are easier to make at scale, more stable thus easier to transport and store, and more cost-effective.”