Eli Lilly announced Thursday that its experimental obesity drug helped patients lose up to 20.1% in weight in a mid-term study.
The first generation of obesity drugs that currently dominates the market focused primarily on the gut hormone GLP-1. However, pharmaceutical companies are now looking for drugs that target other hormones or help maintain muscle mass during fat loss with their next generations of drugs.
The experimental once-weekly drug eloralintide belongs to a class of drugs that mimic the pancreatic hormone amylin, which slows digestion and suppresses hunger.
In an early phase of the study, the drug helped some patients lose more than 11% of their body weight within 12 weeks.
In the medium-term study, patients who received a 1 mg dose of Lilly’s drug lost 9.5% or 10.2 kilograms, while the highest dose of 9 mg achieved a weight loss of 20.1% or 21.3 kilograms. In comparison, patients taking placebo only lost 0.2 kilograms after 48 weeks.
The study involved 263 adults who were overweight and had at least one obesity-related comorbidity, but not type 2 diabetes.
Lilly’s drug also showed improvements in factors such as waist circumference, blood pressure, lipid profiles, glycemic control and inflammatory markers.
The most common side effects were mild to moderate gastrointestinal discomfort and fatigue, which occurred more frequently at higher doses. The frequency of these adverse reactions was lower with slower dose escalation and was similar to placebo at the 1 mg and 3 mg doses.
The data show that eloralintide offers the potential for strong efficacy with improved tolerability and could serve as an alternative to incretin therapies, said Kenneth Custer, president of Lilly Cardiometabolic Health.
Based on these study results, Lilly will begin recruiting patients for a late-stage clinical trial next month. The drug is also being studied in medium-term studies as a monotherapy and in combination with Lilly’s blockbuster GLP-1 drug tirzepatide, sold under the name Zepbound.
