By Maggie Fick
June 5 (Reuters) – Roche said on Friday that patients lost 22.7% of their body weight in a mid-stage trial of its dual-acting experimental obesity drug, with more than a quarter of those who received the highest dose achieving at least 30% weight loss.
Roche is one of several large drugmakers, including AstraZeneca and Amgen, seeking to challenge Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly with next-generation treatments in an obesity market some analysts expect to generate over $100 billion annually in the next decade.
The 22.7% weight loss reported for Roche’s enicepatide was achieved after just 48 weeks.
By comparison, Novo’s Wegovy injection produced about 15% weight loss after 68 weeks in a late-stage trial. In a recent 84-week head-to-head trial, Lilly’s Zepbound delivered weight loss of 25.5%, compared with 23% for Novo’s next-generation obesity drug CagriSema. Enicepatide is a once-weekly injection that, like Zepbound, mimics both the GLP-1 and GIP hormones rather than just GLP-1.
The weight-loss trajectory showed “no hint of any plateau” at week 48, Manu Chakravarthy, Roche’s head of cardiovascular, renal and metabolism product development, said in an interview.
The data suggested patients could continue losing weight if treatment extended beyond the study period, he added.
The Phase 2 study tested enicepatide in 469 adults with overweight or obesity at five doses ranging from 4 mg to 24 mg against a placebo.
Among patients who received the highest dose, 26% shed at least 30% of their weight.
The results, which were presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans, showed a clear dose-response relationship, the Swiss drugmaker said. The GLP-1 class of medicines was originally designed to control blood sugar in type 2 diabetes patients.
Treatment discontinuations due to adverse events were 5.9% for patients taking enicepatide, compared with 1.3% in the placebo group. Most gastrointestinal side effects, which are common with the class of medications, were mild to moderate, the company said.
Among patients classified as obese at the start of the trial, more than half who received doses above 8 mg had moved below the obesity threshold of a body mass index of 30 by week 48, Chakravarthy said.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick in London; Editing by Bill Berkrot)