Eli Lilly reported that an experimental heart pill with GLP-1 helped patients reduce their body weight by 12.4 percent, lower than in earlier trials of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy obesity injection, which plunged the shares of the U.S. drugmaker.
The stock of Lilly dropped approximately 15 percent, which made it stand a chance of the most severe one-day decline in the last quarter of a century, and risk of wiping out more than 100 billion dollars of its market capitalization. The S&P 500 index was the greatest drag because of the selloff, yet Lilly became the largest company in the world in terms of valuation in the healthcare industry.
Dave Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, described 12.4 percent weight loss as a “still pretty good” performance and that the market was overreacting. Although Lilly has lost some of its weight-loss market in a sell-off, he claimed that he was certain that Lilly could maintain its market share. The Lilly statistics were not strong enough to meet the high standards set by the investors, with U.S.-listed shares of Novo increasing more than 6 percent.
These results are encouraging to us,” Lilly CEO David Ricks told investors on an investor call, saying that the company had wanted to bring a strong GLP-1 drug in the familiar form factor of once-daily pills that can be produced more readily.
In this, we think we can contribute something on the scale of human health, and we intend to act with a sense of urgency in getting orforglipron submitted to regulatory agencies around the world to address the global obesity issue, he added.
One Lilly chief stated that the firm would establish a value-based list price of orforglipron, considering factors of the economy and the healthcare system. He explained that Lilly would keep providing direct-to-consumer pricing destinations of the pill, as there is a lag in coverage of the pill among the insurance schemes in the treatment of obesity.
Morgan Stanley analysts predict that orforglipron sales can reach up to $40 billion in 2033, related to obesity and diabetes.
Unlike injectable obesity medications, which are peptides that seek to mimic the appetite-controlling GLP-1 hormone, ORforglipron is a small-molecule pill simpler to create and package, said Kenneth Custer, president of the cardiometabolic health department at Lilly.
Lilly, maker of injectable GLP-1 Zepbound, which competes directly with Wegovy, sees the once-daily pill as an attractive alternative to injections that can be deployed to treat early-stage disease as well as long-term management, Custer said.
The patient prefers taking oral drugs, as opposed to injections. Some research has been carried out revealing that a large number of patients choose pills because of convenience, and they do not like injections.
The overweight or obese adults with weight problems that also had health problems greater than 3,000 persons and 72 weeks of testing showed that the group receiving the greater dose of 36 milligrams orforglipron lost on average 12.4 percent of their bodies opposed to the placebo group, which lost 0.9 percent. The patients under Lilly drug on 6 mg lost 7.8% weight. Early trial results showed great expectations of doing better than Wegovy, as the drug was predicted to perform, said Barclays analyst Emily Field. It is like more than Wegovy, hence the shock.
Nausea frequency among high-dose patients was 33.7 percent and 24 percent experienced vomiting as compared to 10.4 and 3.5 percent, respectively, in the placebo group.
