Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

Eli Lilly's CEO is betting its experimental diabetes drug could transform how we treat obesity

bmi weight obesity weight loss scale
Eli Lilly is hoping to get its experimental diabetes medication approved for weight loss in patients who are nondiabetic and obese. Jose Luis Pelaez/Getty Images

  • Eli Lilly's CEO thinks tirzepatide, an experimental diabetes treatment, could also treat obesity.
  • In a clinical trial, people with diabetes who received tirzepatide lost on average 25 pounds.
  • There are few effective weight-loss drugs available.

Pharma giant Eli Lilly is betting that its experimental diabetes medication could be an effective obesity treatment.

Lilly is developing tirzepatide, an injectable medication taken weekly to treat type 2 diabetes, a chronic condition that affects the body's blood sugar levels. Lilly CEO David Ricks spoke at the STAT Breakthrough Science Summit on Tuesday about the research and said the drug's clinical results of lowering body weight in people with diabetes could parlay into general obesity treatment, an area with few drug-treatment options.

While there are drugs targeting obesity on the market, they aren't commonly prescribed because of dangerous side effects, including dizziness, tremors, palpitations, and the worsening of heart conditions. There are also doubts about their cost-effectiveness, and insurers are reluctant to cover them. But in recent years, drugmakers have started showing that medications initially used for people with type 2 diabetes could also help people with obesity lose weight.

In June, the FDA approved drugmaker Novo Nordisk's medication semaglutide for people with obesity and people who are overweight and have a weight-related condition, including high cholesterol or high blood pressure.

"Obesity has been a cosmetic market driven by medicines that had a modest effect," Ricks told STAT. "We think tirzepatide could unlock what is the great driver of healthcare costs — $1 trillion a year driven by obesity — and we hope to prove that over the next many years."

Drugmakers are racing to develop a new class of weight-loss drugs

Lilly is running a program to test tirzepatide in people who don't have diabetes.

"We are committed to studying not only the obesity population but people with obesity who don't have diabetes," Ricks said at the STAT event. "We've got a big program running where we hope the weight loss is even better than in diabetes — but also then pulling apart the pieces of that that actually cause medical harm."

Already, Lilly's trial results in people with type 2 diabetes suggested that tirzepatide could help people lose weight.

In a late-stage clinical trial of 2,002 people, patients with type 2 diabetes taking the highest dose of tirzepatide lost an average of 25 pounds and reduced their A1C, a protein that indicates the amount of blood sugar present, by approximately 2.3% in 40 weeks, with around a third of patients' A1C levels dropping to nondiabetic levels in that time frame.

The study compared tirzepatide head-to-head with semaglutide. Those patients with diabetes who received semaglutide lost an average of 13 pounds over 40 weeks.

For semaglutide, the drug helped people who didn't have diabetes lose weight as well, which led to its approval as an obesity treatment.

A study published in March in The New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who were nondiabetic who took semaglutide lost an average of 33 pounds over 68 weeks, while those in the placebo group lost an average of 6 pounds over that time period.

Healthcare Dispensed Pharmaceutical

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account