By Maggie Fick<\/p>\n
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 \u200cdrug, with more than a quarter of those who received the highest dose \u200cachieving at least 30% weight loss.<\/p>\n
Roche is one of several large drugmakers, including AstraZeneca and Amgen, seeking to \u200bchallenge 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.<\/p>\n
The 22.7% weight loss reported for Roche’s enicepatide was achieved after just 48 weeks.<\/p>\n
By comparison, Novo’s Wegovy injection produced about 15% weight loss \u200cafter 68 weeks in a late-stage \u2060trial. 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. \u2060Enicepatide is a once-weekly injection that, like Zepbound, mimics both the GLP-1 and GIP hormones rather than just GLP-1.<\/p>\n
The weight-loss trajectory showed “no hint of any plateau” at week 48, Manu Chakravarthy, Roche’s head \u200bof \u200bcardiovascular, renal and metabolism product development, said in \u200ban interview.<\/p>\n
The data suggested patients could \u200ccontinue losing weight if treatment extended beyond the study period, he added.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Among patients who received the highest dose, 26% shed at least 30% of their weight.<\/p>\n
The results, which were presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting \u200cin New Orleans, showed a clear dose-response relationship, \u200bthe Swiss drugmaker said. The GLP-1 class of medicines \u200bwas originally designed to control blood sugar \u200bin type 2 diabetes patients.<\/p>\n
Treatment discontinuations due to adverse events were \u200c5.9% for patients taking enicepatide, compared with \u200b1.3% in the placebo \u200bgroup. Most gastrointestinal side effects, which are common with the class of medications, were mild to moderate, the company said.<\/p>\n
Among patients classified as obese at the start of \u200bthe trial, more than half \u200cwho received doses above 8 mg had moved below the obesity threshold of \u200ba body mass index of 30 by week 48, Chakravarthy said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bMaggie Fick in London; Editing by Bill Berkrot)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Maggie Fick June 5 (Reuters) – Roche said on Friday that patients lost 22.7% of their body…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[124],"tags":[216,41204,2233,134,1904],"class_list":["post-79546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-roche","tag-eli-lilly","tag-manu-chakravarthy","tag-novo-nordisk","tag-roche","tag-weight-loss"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116714868910747452","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}