Obesity, Big Pharma’s New Eldorado

Does the pharmaceutical industry have its next cash cow? After decades of failure, a new generation of drugs specifically aimed at weight loss for obese patients is starting to appear in North America and Europe. Showing particularly promising clinical results (15% to 20% weight loss on average), this treatment, two to three times more effective than currently available, could be revolutionary in the management of this disease, whose progression worries health authorities. .

Because after the first warning launched by the World Health Organization in 1997 “The first non-infectious epidemic in human history”, obesity spread again. Today, it affects more than a billion people worldwide, including 650 million adults. In France, 8.5 million French people are currently suffering.

This multi-caused condition, recognized as a chronic disease by the European Union from 2021, is not without serious consequences. People who are obese are particularly at risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, or certain cancers. A threat that is also reflected in rising health insurance costs. According to an Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report published in 2019, France devotes 4.9% of its health budget to obesity, overweight and related diseases.

A growing market

For market pioneers hoping to carve out a niche with their new anti-obesity weapon. Among the pharmaceutical companies in the race is Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, which won the green light from US health authorities in 2021 to market Wegovy, a prescription weight-loss treatment for obese people that is given by subcutaneous injection. A pre-filled pen, similar to existing diabetes solutions.

The comparison is not trivial. Wegovy is a variation of its big brother, Ozempic, a successful antidiabetic drug already developed by Novo Nordisk, one of the world’s heavyweights in this market, and authorized since 2017 across the Atlantic for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. The latter contains semaglutide, an analogue of GLP-1, a natural hormone that helps control blood sugar and was originally intended only to stimulate insulin release in diabetic patients. Noting that mice and rats lost weight in clinical trials, scientists then noticed that it also had an effect on the areas of the brain that regulate appetite.