2024-07-30 18:01:51
The trade in drugs for weight loss is booming. Now, Roche, another large pharmaceutical company, wants to bring a drug onto the market soon.
The Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche wants to speed up the development of its drugs against diabetes and obesity. CEO Thomas Schinecker told the Financial Times that Roche’s first drugs against obesity would come to market “significantly faster than expected” – possibly by 2028. This booming market is currently dominated by the US company Eli Lilly and the Danish company Novo Nordisk.
In mid-July, Roche once again published positive study data on a potential weight-loss drug. This was the candidate CT-996, which is taken once a day to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. The drug comes from the portfolio of the US company Carmot, which Roche acquired in December for around 3 billion US dollars.
CT-996 belongs to the new class of lipid-lowering drugs, the GLP-1 drugs, and achieved significant results in two sub-studies of an ongoing multi-part Phase I clinical trial. Roche had just published data on its other obesity candidate CT-388, which had been well received by analysts and investors.
As Schinecker told the FT, Roche could have “around seven” drugs from the Carmot takeover, some of which are in an even earlier stage of development. Roche shares have also recently benefited from the study data.
The multi-billion dollar market for so-called GLP-1 drugs is becoming increasingly competitive. Many pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim, are working on products that compete with those of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.