A new weight loss drug could beat Ozempic's side effect problem
The Denmark-based drug maker Zealand Pharma said Tuesday that its experimental weight-loss drug could help patients lose pounds with fewer side effects than current anti-obesity medications on the market.
The company said that only about a third of patients that took up to 4.8 milligram doses of its drug petrelintide during an early-stage clinical trial experienced nausea — one of the most common side effects of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Zealand revealed the new finding at the industry conference ObesityWeek in San Antonio, Bloomberg reports.
Zealand is pitching petrelinde as an alternative for patients who can’t tolerate GLP-1 treatments, which can include common side effects like nauseau, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain.
According to Zealand, there were no serious or severe adverse events during the study and only one out 48 participants dropped out of the trial due to side effects.
“These results support our conviction that petrelintide is very well tolerated and can potentially play an important role as an alternative to incretin-based therapies for the management of overweight and obesity,” said Zealand chief medical officer David Kendall in a press release, at the time.
Zealand’s petrelintide works different from Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs as it doesn’t mimic the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). Instead, it mimics a hormone that is co-secreted with insulin in the pancreas that increases satiety, known asamylin.
Zealand previously reported in June that patients taking a high dose of petrelintide over 16 weeks lost on average 8.6% of their weight. For comparison, a clinical trial of Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) Wegovy found that it helped users lose about 15% of their body weight over 68 weeks.
The company plans start a mid-stage trial of the drug later this year and expects it could hit the market in 2029 or 2030, according to Bloomberg.
In August, the company said it is looking for a potential partnership with a big pharma company to help it develop, manufacture, and sell petrelintide.
GLP-1s are a class of diabetes and obesity medications that mimic a hormone that regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite. Demand for these medications have turned Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly (LLY), the producer of Mounjaro and Zepbound, into the largest pharma companies in the world.
Now, several pharmaceutical companies are working to introduce new drugs to get in on the demand. In addition to Zealand Pharma, Viking Therapeutics, Regeneron, Amgen, and Pfizer are all developing new weight-loss drugs.
