A logo at the Roche Holding AG headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Roche<\/a> on Thursday said\u00a0its experimental weight loss drug<\/a> showed promising results<\/a> in an early-stage trial, boosting the company’s bid to compete in the booming market for those treatments.<\/p>\n The Swiss company joined a slate of drugmakers racing to develop obesity drugs through its almost $3 billion acquisition<\/a> of Carmot Therapeutics in December. But its weekly weight loss injection, called CT-388, is still years away from entering the market.<\/p>\n The weight loss drug space is dominated by treatments from Novo Nordisk<\/a> and Eli Lilly<\/a>, and some analysts say the market will be worth $100 billion by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n Roche’s CT-388 helped patients with obesity lose 18.8% of their weight relative to those who received a placebo, after 24 weeks\u00a0in the phase one trial, the company said.<\/p>\n Roche added that all of the patients who received the drug lost more than 5% of their weight. Meanwhile, 70% of those people lost more than 15% of their weight, and 45% lost more than 20%.<\/p>\n The treatment works by mimicking the effect of two gut hormones \u2014 GLP-1 and GIP \u2014 to suppress a person’s appetite, just like Eli Lilly’s popular weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes injection Mounjaro.<\/p>\n Scientists have hypothesized that targeting those two hormones could have a meaningful effect on weight loss and blood sugar levels with fewer side effects than drugs that only target GLP-1, such as Novo Nordisk’s weight loss treatment Wegovy.<\/p>\n Roche’s CT-388 is being developed to treat both obesity and diabetes.<\/p>\n Roche said it did not observe any new or unexpected side effects in patients taking CT-388. The company noted that mild to moderate gastrointestinal side effects were the most common, consistent with other weight loss and diabetes drugs that work the same way.<\/p>\n CT-388 also normalized blood sugar levels in a subgroup of patients with pre-diabetes.<\/p>\n Roche said it is testing CT-388 in an additional group of patients with obesity and diabetes over 12 weeks. The company expects data from those patients in the second half of the year.<\/p>\n Eli Lilly’s Zepbound delivered up to 22% weight loss after 72 weeks, while Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy has led to 15% weight loss after 68 weeks.<\/p>\n