The owner of Wegovy and Ozempic has suffered a significant setback, as its highly anticipated new weight-loss treatment was labelled \u201cobsolete\u201d after disappointing clinical trials.<\/p>\n
Novo Nordisk\u2019s shares fell sharply on Monday after the results from testing the Danish company\u2019s CagriSema drug fell short of investors\u2019 expectations.<\/p>\n
The weekly injection combines cagrilintide, which mimics the pancreatic hormone amylin, and semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic that mimics the gut hormone GLP-1, suppressing appetite and making users feel full more quickly. This means CagriSema leads to greater weight loss than Wegovy.<\/p>\n
The study was designed to show that CagriSema was at least as good as the Novo rival Eli Lilly\u2019s leading anti-obesity drug Zepbound, which contains tirzepatide.<\/p>\n
Against initial expectations of 25% weight loss, CagriSema disappointed in a late-state study involving 809 people. It led to average weight loss of 23% after 84 weeks, compared with 25.5% for tirzepatide.<\/p>\n
The new Novo treatment \u201cdid not achieve its primary endpoint of demonstrating non-inferiority on weight loss for CagriSema compared to tirzepatide after 84 weeks\u201d, the company said<\/a> on Monday.<\/p>\n S\u00f8ren L\u00f8ntoft Hansen, a senior analyst at Denmark\u2019s AL Sydbank, said<\/a>: \u201cThis is something of a swing and a miss.\u201d He added: \u201cIt is difficult to assess whether this data will influence Novo Nordisk\u2019s decision to launch CagriSema on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n Novo\u2019s share price plunged 16.5% in Copenhagen to the lowest level since June 2021. Photograph: Tom Little\/Reuters<\/p>\n Novo\u2019s share price plunged 16.5% in Copenhagen to the lowest level since June 2021, when Wegovy was launched, taking its losses over the past year to almost 60%, while Lilly\u2019s stock rose 4.3% on Wall Street.<\/p>\n Novo, which had recorded booming sales of weight-loss and diabetes medications, turning it into Europe\u2019s most valuable company in recent years, has slashed its profit and sales estimates<\/a> several times, as it lost ground to Lilly. Novo had been betting on CagriSema \u2013 as well as its new Wegovy pill<\/a>, launched in the US \u2013 to revive sales.<\/p>\n Analysts at UBS had already, in January, lowered their peak sales forecast for Novo\u2019s GLP-1 drugs from $80bn (\u00a359bn) to $75bn in 2032, after previous disappointing CagriSema trial results.<\/p>\n They said of the latest results: \u201cSignificant negative. An inferior result to tirzepatide was very unexpected.\u201d<\/p>\n Emmanuel Papadakis at Deutsche Bank told Novo management on an investor call: \u201cCommiserations on the results. CagriSema looks somewhat obsolete now as a competitive upgrade of semaglutide \u2026 or as a competitive alternative to tirzepatide.\u201d<\/p>\n The Novo chief executive, Mike Doustdar, rejected the comments, saying: \u201cIt\u2019s quite belittling; it\u2019s a fantastic drug in all honesty. When CagriSema will make it to the market early next year as the first amylin-based product, it will have the best weight-loss label [of] any marketed product.\u201d<\/p>\n Novo hopes another study of a higher CagriSema dose will show better results. It has already submitted the medication to the US drug regulator for approval based on earlier trial evidence, and hopes for the green light later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The owner of Wegovy and Ozempic has suffered a significant setback, as its highly anticipated new weight-loss treatment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-500050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}