Daily Pill May Work as Well as Ozempic for Weight Loss and Blood Sugar

A daily pill may be as effective in lowering blood sugar and aiding weight loss in people with Type 2 diabetes as the popular injectable drugs Mounjaro and Ozempic, according to results of a clinical trial announced by Eli Lilly on Thursday morning.

The drug, orforglipron, is a GLP-1, a class of drugs that have become blockbusters because of their weight-loss effects. But GLP-1s are expensive, must be kept refrigerated and must be injected. A pill that produces similar results has the potential to become far more widely used, though it is also expected to be expensive.

“In the coming decades, more than 700 million people around the world will have Type 2 diabetes, and over a billion will have obesity,” said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer. “Injections cannot be the solution for billions of people around the world.”

Lilly said it would seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration later this year to market orforglipron for obesity and early in 2026 for diabetes. Industry analysts expect the drug to win approval sometime next year and to eventually become a major blockbuster. Eli Lilly is not expected to announce a price for the drug until after it wins approval.

The company announced a summary of its results on Thursday in a news release, as drug companies are required to do immediately after they receive study results that could affect their stock price. The company said it would present the detailed results at a meeting of diabetes researchers in June and will publish them in a peer-reviewed journal.

But Lilly did not release the underlying data from its trial and the results it disclosed had not been examined by outside experts.

The clinical trial involved 559 people with Type 2 diabetes who took the new pill or a placebo for 40 weeks. In patients who took orforglipron, blood sugar levels fell by 1.3 to 1.6 percent, as measured by A1C, about the same amount in that time period experienced by patients taking Ozempic and Mounjaro in unrelated trials. For 65 percent of people taking the new pill, blood sugar levels dropped into the normal range.

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