Marissa Cole 
Within twelve weeks of its approval for weight management, the semaglutide pill was being started almost as often as the injection. A research letter in JAMA Network Open, drawn from the medical records of nearly 48 million US adults who qualified for an obesity drug, counted 148,792 people who began oral semaglutide between 22 December … Read more
UBT251, an experimental once-weekly injection that acts on three hormone receptors, lowered body weight by between 13.6% and 19.7% over 24 weeks, against 2.0% on placebo, in a phase 2 trial of 205 adults in China published in Cell Metabolism on 7 October. It uses the same three-receptor approach as Lilly’s retatrutide. For patients, nothing … Read more
A chemically synthesised version of semaglutide, developed by the Chinese drugmaker CSPC under the code HD1916, produced weight loss equivalent to Wegovy in a 44-week randomised trial of 462 Chinese adults with obesity, published on 7 October in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. For readers in the US nothing changes yet: HD1916 is not approved here, … Read more
Most adults who stayed on tirzepatide for three years in the SURMOUNT-1 trial put back only a small part of what they had lost after reaching their lowest weight, according to a post hoc analysis published in Obesity Pillars. Of 690 participants with prediabetes who took at least three-quarters of their doses and lost at … Read more
The American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes have published their first update since 2022 of their joint consensus on managing type 2 diabetes, and it advocates using GLP-1-based drugs or SGLT2 inhibitors earlier, potentially from diagnosis, to protect the heart and kidneys. The report appeared in Diabetologia on 2 … Read more
Orforglipron, Eli Lilly’s once-daily GLP-1 pill, did not raise the risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death compared with insulin glargine in 2,749 adults with type 2 diabetes and established heart or kidney disease, according to the ACHIEVE-4 trial published in The Lancet on 30 September. It is the first cardiovascular-outcomes trial of a … Read more
Survodutide, an experimental once-weekly injection from Boehringer Ingelheim that acts on both the GLP-1 and glucagon receptors, reduced body weight by 8.2% to 9.8% over 76 weeks in adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes, against 3.9% on placebo, in a phase 3 trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine on 1 October. … Read more
Two analyses of the SELECT trial, published a day apart, reach the same uncomfortable conclusion from different directions. The first, in the European Heart Journal, tried to work out how much of semaglutide’s 20% reduction in heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths runs through weight loss and the other risk factors it improves, and could … Read more