On Friday (March 8th) local time, Martin Holst Lange, Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, told the media that he believes the company can launch its experimental oral weight loss drug, amycretin, within this decade.
Lange said, "I never promise a schedule for (drugs), but I can say that it's more than enough for at least this decade." This decade refers to 2021-2030, and he also revealed that the company hopes to promote the development of both oral and injectable amycretin.
Yesterday, Novo Nordisk held the Capital Markets Day (CMD) event to report to the outside world on the latest progress of the company's 2025 strategic vision. One of the most eye-catching is the latest Phase I clinical trial results of its long-acting co agonist, amycretin, which takes GLP-1 and amylin orally.
The data shows that in a small trial of 16 patients, the average weight loss after 12 weeks in the patients taking amoycretin reached 13.1%, significantly higher than the 1.1% in the placebo group. In contrast, Novo Nordisk's star weight loss drug Wegovy can only reduce patients' weight by about 6% after 12 weeks.
At that time, Lange said that the optimistic experimental results proved the rationality of further research on the pill. He also revealed that a larger scale Phase II trial will begin in the second half of this year and is expected to yield results in early 2026. Afterwards, the third and fourth stages of testing will need to be conducted, which may take several more years.
However, the efficacy of oral amycretin is already exciting enough. Benefiting from this news, Novo Nordisk's US stock market closed up 8.95% on Thursday, with a latest market value of $606.56 billion, jumping to twelfth place on the global market value list, surpassing Visa and Tesla, and falling behind Lilly and Broadcom.
Caixin News Agency previously mentioned that compared to weight loss injections, oral tablets have huge advantages. They have super convenience, better storage and transportation, stable therapeutic effects, fewer contraindications, and are more conducive to large-scale production to reduce costs, which is bound to become an important explosive point.
In addition to Novo Nordisk, competitors such as Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca are also competing in the field of oral tablets. Previously, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla stated that oral tablets will play a very important role as not everyone can receive injection therapy.