Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk isn’t sitting on its laurels when it comes to weight loss. The Danish-based company has just revealed preliminary data suggesting that its experimental drug amycretin can help people lose even more weight than its already blockbuster drug semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. Even better, amycretin is taken as a pill, as opposed to the injections needed for Ozempic and Wegovy.
Researchers presented the company’s data on amycertin at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes this week, which comes from a Phase I trial of people living with obesity. Those taking amycretin were found on average to lose 13.1% of their body weight over a 12 week period—far above the average weight loss seen in those taking a placebo and on pace to perhaps even surpass the success seen with semaglutide.
For comparison, people taking high dose semaglutide in clinical trials have been found to lose about 6% of their body weight on average after three months and about 15% body weight after six months. That raises the tantalizing possibility that people on amycretin could expect to lose 25% or more weight during the same period, an average level of weight loss not seen with any current obesity medication and comparable with the most effective bariatric surgeries.
“It’s almost like a miracle pill,” Susan Spratt, an endocrinologist and the senior medical director for the Population Health Management Office at Duke Health, told NBC News.
Novo Nordisk’s data has yet to be vetted by outside experts, an important part of the scientific process. And it’s still only Phase I data, which is explicitly only designed to tell us whether a drug is safe to keep testing in humans, not to confirm its effectiveness. On that end, the company reported that the adverse effects seen with the drug were generally mild to moderate and comparable to those seen in semaglutide. The most common side effects with semaglutide are gastrointestinal, such as nausea and diarrhea, though these symptoms tend to wane over time.
The pharmacology behind amycretin does lend support to the idea that it could beat semaglutide. Semaglutide mimics the gut hormone GLP-1, which helps regulate our blood sugar and sense of hunger, among other things. But amycretin is designed to mimic both GLP-1 and another hormone key to our hunger and blood sugar regulation, amylin. Eli Lilly’s competing drug tirzepatide, sold under the names Mounjaro and Zepbound, deploys a similar dual-action strategy (albeit using GLP and the hormone GIP), and has been found to provide greater weight loss on average than semaglutide as well.
Much more data in humans confirming amycreitin’s effectiveness and safety will be needed before it would be able to reach the public. But this is just one of many promising leads in the future of weight loss treatment being developed by Novo Nordisk and its competitors. Another of the company’s candidates, CagriSema, blends together three drugs that mimic our gut hormones, for instance, with early results suggesting a similar level of weight loss as projected with amycretin.
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