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
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
When a state Medicaid programme starts paying for GLP-1 drugs labeled for obesity, the bill for those drugs goes up. A study in JAMA Health Forum suggests the net increase is smaller than that figure implies, because some of the new obesity-labeled prescriptions appear to replace diabetes-labeled versions of the same molecules, which every state … 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
On September 29, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the Justice Department’s Criminal Division announced conspiracy and smuggling charges against Swapnadip Roy and Vicky Ramancha, both Indian nationals, with the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations assisting. The indictment alleges that between July 2023 and April 2024 they obtained counterfeit … Read more
Adults with obesity and a raised inflammatory marker who were prescribed a GLP-1 receptor agonist had fewer deaths, heart attacks and strokes over the following decade than closely matched adults given an older weight or diabetes drug, according to a study published on 21 September in the American Journal of Cardiology. The gap was driven … Read more
Prescriptions for GLP-1 receptor agonists written to US adults with no documented reason for taking them rose roughly 15-fold between 2021 and 2025, according to an analysis of electronic health records published on 22 September in Obesity. Among 92.4 million adults whose records showed neither type 2 diabetes nor obesity with a qualifying comorbidity, about … Read more
Novo Nordisk announced this morning that CagriSema, its investigational combination of semaglutide and a second hormone, beat tirzepatide on weight loss in a head-to-head phase 3 trial in adults with type 2 diabetes: an estimated 12.4% against 9.1% at week 60. A second phase 3 trial put CagriSema at 21.0% weight loss against 2.0% on … Read more