Eli Lilly's Retatrutide: Breakthrough Weight Loss Drug

Eli Lilly’s experimental weight-loss drug retatrutide met the primary and key secondary endpoints in a trial, showing significant improvements in weight loss and management of blood sugar levels.

Participants of the trial who were taking 12 milligrams of retatrutide lost an average of 36.6 pounds over 40 weeks, the pharmaceutical company said Thursday.

The drug also lowered patients’ A1C, a metric for blood-sugar levels, which was the trial’s primary endpoint. A1C levels decreased by an average of 1.7% to 2% across doses.

The company said patients who were on the highest dose lost 15.3% of their weight while those in the placebo group lost 2.6%.

Retatrutide is Lilly’s next-generation diabetes and weight-loss drug, and has shown higher weight-loss potential compared with the medicines that Lilly currently sells, Mounjaro and Zepbound. Both drugs saw sales more than double in its recent fourth quarter from the previous year.

Patients taking the drug showed improvements across cardiovascular risk factors, as well, including non-HDL cholesterol, triglycerides and systolic blood pressure, Eli Lilly said. The most common adverse reactions to retatrutide were nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. The reactions mostly happened when dosages were increased.

Eli Lilly plans to share more detailed results at a conference in June.

Shares recently traded at $914.55, down 0.4% premarket.

Article was written by MNS news - see full MNS article here