Dive Brief:
- An experimental, triple-acting obesity drug from Novo Nordisk helped some patients in a Phase 2 trial in China lose up to a fifth of their body weight, the company said Tuesday.
- The study, run by Novo’s Guangdong, China-based development partner United Biotechnology, enrolled 205 patients who are overweight or have obesity and tested three different doses of the therapy, UBT251, against a placebo over 24 weeks. According to Novo, the highest average weight loss observed over that time was 19.7%, versus 2% for placebo recipients.
- Novo didn’t provide other details, but said all dose groups had statistically significant improvements compared to a placebo on key secondary measures of metabolic health. The most common side effects were gastrointestinal in nature and the “vast majority” were mild to moderate and diminished over time, the company said. Initial data from a global Phase 1b/2a study are expected next year.
Dive Insight:
Once the leader in the ultra-lucrative market for obesity drugs, Novo is now reeling.
Chief rival Eli Lilly now claims more than 60% of the U.S. market due to the success of tirzepatide, a medication known as Zepbound for obesity, and that’s become the world’s top-selling medicine. Compounders have chipped away at sales of Novo’s flagship weight loss medication Wegovy. Even the early launch success of the company’s Wegovy pill has been overshadowed by troubling sales forecasts as well as, more recently, the failure of one its newer drugs to match Zepbound in a head-to-head trial.
Still, Novo has an array of other emerging weight loss medicines in its portfolio that can help it regain momentum. One is UBT251, which it gained partial rights to through a potentially $2 billion deal with United Biotechnology last March. That pact was one of more than 60 licensing agreements U.S. or European drugmakers signed with their China-based counterparts last year, according to BioPharma Dive data. Six of them involved experimental weight loss therapies.
The obesity drugs currently on the market target one or two gut hormones. UBT251 aims at three — GLP-1, GIP and glucagon — representing a new way to combat the disease. The hope is that doing so might spur greater weight loss than therapies like Wegovy or Zepbound.
Novo, though, is trailing Lilly in bringing a “triple G” drug to market. Lilly’s version, retatrutide, induced as much as 29% weight loss in one Phase 3 trial in December — results one Wall Street analyst described as “raising the bar” in the obesity field. Retatrutide’s numbers could climb higher in other trials, too, as that initial late-stage study was in people with a type of arthritis pain and not designed to maximize weight loss.
In a mid-stage study published in The New England Journal of Medicine three years ago, retatrutide treatment led to as much as 17.5% weight loss after 24 weeks. Without mentioning retatrutide by name, Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s chief scientific officer and research head, claimed in a statement Tuesday that UBT251’s results suggest a “differentiated” clinical, safety and tolerability profile.
United will present detailed data from the study of UBT251 at a medical meeting later this year. Novo also plans to start a Phase 2 experiment in diabetes in 2026.
