{"id":348057,"date":"2025-11-01T13:29:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T13:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/348057\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T13:29:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T13:29:15","slug":"can-a-weight-loss-and-diabetes-drug-treat-long-covid-san-diego-union-tribune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/348057\/","title":{"rendered":"Can a weight loss and diabetes drug treat long COVID? \u2013 San Diego Union-Tribune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scripps Research in La Jolla announced a new clinical trial Thursday that will assess the effectiveness of using drugs approved for diabetes treatment and weight loss to treat long COVID, the debilitating chronic condition diagnosed in an estimated<\/a> 20 million Americans and about 400 million people worldwide.<\/p>\n

Developed to help people with type 2 diabetes control their blood sugar levels, these GLP-1 medications have generated billions of dollars in revenue for their ability to slow the pace of digestion and reduce appetite, helping millions worldwide lose weight.<\/p>\n

But, as always happens with big pharma blockbusters, the research community is busy exploring other possible applications for this class of compounds, with clinical trials underway or forming in cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and obstructive sleep apnea.<\/p>\n

And growing evidence of its\u00a0anti-inflammation properties, notes Scripps computational biologist and study co-principal investigator Julia Vogel, has driven increasing interest in using GLP-1 drugs to treat at least some of long COVID\u2019s myriad symptoms<\/a>, which range from brain fog and difficulty breathing to fatigue and joint pain.<\/p>\n

The trial, which seeks to enroll 1,000 long COVID patients nationwide, will explore how self-administration of tirzepatide, Eli Lilly\u2019s GLP-1 agonist marketed as Mounjaro for diabetes treatment and Zepbound for weight loss, affects symptoms over a 12-month period.<\/p>\n

\u201cGLP-1 drugs have been found to do so many different things,\u201d Vogel said. \u201cThey\u2019ve helped with all kinds of immune conditions, in part by reducing inflammation, and we know that is an issue in long COVID.\u201d<\/p>\n

Desperate for therapies that work, the long COVID community has already begun experimenting with \u201cmicrodosing\u201d GLP-1 drugs, with a post made one year ago on the social news site Reddit entitled<\/a> \u201cOzempic for Long Covid?\u201d reporting anecdotal evidence of the drug helping some improve their symptoms. And the formal scientific community has taken note, with a formal discussion of GLP-1\u2019s possibilities for long COVID occurring during a panel discussion at a scientific meeting on Sept. 12 and still available<\/a> on YouTube.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve heard anecdotal reports of people who literally, on their first shot, just feel like their symptoms are just clearing like they didn\u2019t even realize that they had so much anxiety until it was just gone,\u201d Vogel said.<\/p>\n

Given that there is currently no drug to treat long COVID despite more than $1 billion in spending on research by the federal government, the possibility that GLP-1 drugs are beneficial in this domain is extremely appealing. However, anecdotal evidence will never convince health insurance companies to cover such prescriptions, nor doctors to broadly write prescriptions without proof of efficacy. Those are the goals of the new Scripps Research study.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.Dr. Eric Topol and computational biologist Julia Vogel are co-principal investigators of the Long COVID Treatment Trial launched on Oct. 30, 2025, by Scripps Research in San Diego.<\/p>\n

Dr. Eric Topol, the study\u2019s co-principal investigator and a well-known Scripps vice president, noted that no trials to date, and there have been very few so far, have met the level of rigor that will be employed for the Long COVID Treatment Trial.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has still not been a large, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of a candidate drug,\u201d Topol said. \u201cThat is what we have started this week with tirzepatide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trial protocols call for half of the 1,000 participants to receive a placebo, inert doses that have no effect, rather than the active drug, creating a control group that is critical to obtaining scientifically valid results.<\/p>\n

Scripps Research, he noted, has written many papers on long COVID since the pandemic. A paper that a team of researchers published<\/a> in January 2023 titled \u201cLong COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations\u201d that details how this lingering illness affects many different systems of the body has been particularly well received, with nearly 2 million views.<\/p>\n

Vogel herself suffers long COVID fatigue so severe that the former distance runner was forced to begin using a wheelchair and leave San Diego, rejoining her extended family on the East Coast. It was seeing one of their own so severely affected by the condition, Topol said, that spurred a strong dedication to long COVID research.<\/p>\n

\u201cJulia was hit in early 2020, and her suffering and course led to our work to learn about the condition and seek a treatment,\u201d Topol said in an email Thursday.<\/p>\n

GLP-1 drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy from Novo Nordisk, are designed to be self-administered, with patients giving themselves shots once per week. This fact allowed the Scripps team to create a \u201cdigital\u201d trial that mails supplies to participants rather than requiring them to travel to clinical sites as many trials do.<\/p>\n

Participants, who must have medical documentation of long COVID, will receive four doses of tirzepatide in the mail, starting with lower concentrations of the active ingredient and increasing over six months to find each participant\u2019s \u201coptimal dose,\u201d Vogel said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ask them to report their weight and any side effects every week and then each month, before their next shipment, there\u2019s a discussion with one of the study physicians about, \u2018okay, are you still having any side effects?\u2019\u201d Vogel said. \u201cIf they\u2019re still having any side effects, (the dose) does not go up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they\u2019re feeling better and they\u2019re interested in going up, then they can, or they can just choose to stay where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Participants must regularly record their fatigue level using a special smartphone application so that researchers can understand how the drug affects this key measurement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re also going to be sending everyone a wearable (electronic monitor) so they will have this passive monitoring of their daily step count, their heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, etc.,\u201d Vogel said.<\/p>\n

Fifty participants will be asked to go one step further, using a special device that can collect blood samples from the upper arm with the press of a button. These collections will allow deeper analysis of biomarkers and other factors that can be correlated with self-reported fatigue assessments and wearable data to provide a fuller picture of the biological effects of the drug.<\/p>\n

In addition to a long COVID diagnosis, participants must be at least 18 years of age with internet access, a \u201cfatigue severity scale score\u201d of at least 36 and be willing to follow study protocols. Pregnant women are excluded due to the unknown potential risks of the drug to unborn babies. Those already taking tirzepatide, or any other GLP-1 drug, are also excluded, according to protocols<\/a> posted on clinicaltrials.gov, as are those with certain medical conditions or medical histories that researchers have determined could confound results. Participants must also not be in the \u201cunderweight\u201d category with a body mass index less than 18.5.<\/p>\n

As co-principal investigator, Vogel is also barred from participating.<\/p>\n

Is this bittersweet, given all that she has been through since she first started experiencing life-altering symptoms?<\/p>\n

\u201cI would not meet the eligibility criteria because I\u2019m underweight, so I don\u2019t mind at all,\u201d Vogel said in an email Thursday. \u201cMy main feeling today is excitement about the potential to help people who are coping with the same illness that I am.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if the drug does not decrease the symptom burden as we hope, we will learn a lot about its effects on people with Long COVID, and if it does help, I\u2019ll be beyond thrilled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lilly contributed the doses to the trial, which is funded by the Schmidt Initiative for Long Covid<\/a>, a nonprofit organization created in 2023 by philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt.<\/p>\n

More information on the trial is available at longcovid.scripps.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scripps Research in La Jolla announced a new clinical trial Thursday that will assess the effectiveness of using…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":348058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,210,728,50,3549,3550,7264,159,7289,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-348057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-local-news","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-san-diego","15":"tag-san-diego-county","16":"tag-sandiego","17":"tag-science","18":"tag-top-stories-sdut","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115474685888425464","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}