Roche wants to bring weight loss drugs to market quickly
Published: Monday, Jul 29th 2024, 09:10
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Pills against the fat belly? Pharmaceutical companies are expecting a booming market from such concepts. A Swiss player wants to enter this market soon.
The Basel-based pharmaceutical company Roche wants to speed up the development of its drugs for diabetes and obesity. CEO Thomas Schinecker told the "Financial Times" that Roche's first anti-obesity drugs would reach the market "much faster than expected" - possibly by 2028. This booming market is currently dominated by the US company Eli Lilly and the Danish company Novo Nordisk.
In mid-July, Roche once again published positive study data on a potential weight loss drug. This involved the candidate CT-996, which is taken once a day to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. The drug comes from the portfolio of the US company Carmot, which Roche acquired in December for around 3 billion US dollars.
Several anti-obesity drugs in development CT-996 belongs to the new class of lipid-lowering drugs, the GLP-1 drugs, and achieved significant results in two sub-studies of an ongoing multi-part Phase I clinical trial. Only shortly before this, Roche had published data on its other obesity candidate CT-388, which had been positively received by analysts and investors.
As Schinecker now told the "Financial Times", Roche could have "around seven" drugs from the Carmot acquisition, some of which are in even earlier stages of development. Roche shares have also recently benefited from the study data.
The multi-billion dollar market for so-called GLP-1 drugs is becoming increasingly competitive. Many pharmaceutical companies, including industry giants Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim, are working on competing products to those of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
©Keystone/SDA
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