Roche Pharmaceuticals said on Thursday that its experimental weight loss drug showed promising results in early trials, enabling the company to advance in the booming weight loss drug market.
The Swiss pharmaceutical company bought Carmot Therapeutics in December last year for nearly $3 billion, thereby joining the competition among many pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for obesity.
However, CT-388, a weekly weight loss injection developed by the company, will take several years to officially enter the market.
The current leaders in weight loss medicine are two companies, Novo Nordisk (Novo Nordisk) and Eli Lilly (Eli Lilly).
Some analysts say the weight loss drug market will be worth $100 billion by 2030.
Roche Pharmaceuticals said that after the first phase of the drug trial, which lasted 24 weeks, the obese patients treated with its CT-388 drug lost 18.8% of their weight compared to the test group receiving placebo.
Roche added that all patients who received the drug lost at least 5% of their weight. Of these, 70% lost more than 15% of their weight, and 45% lost more than 20% of their weight.
This drug suppresses appetite by mimicking the effects of two gut hormones (GLP-1 and GIP), and the principle is the same as Eli Lilly's popular diet pill Zepbound and the diabetes injection Mounjaro.
Scientists speculate that therapies targeting these two hormones at the same time can have a meaningful impact on weight loss and blood sugar levels, and that they have fewer side effects than drugs that only target GLP-1 (such as Novo & Nordisk's weight loss treatment drug Wegovy).