Wegovy users keep weight off for 4 years, says Novo Nordisk study

LONDON - Patients taking Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy obesity treatment maintained an average of 10 per cent weight loss after four years, potentially boosting the drugmaker’s case to insurers and governments to cover the cost of the effective but expensive drug.

The Danish drugmaker presented the new long-term data on May 14 at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy, in a new analysis from a large study for which substantial results had been published in 2023.

“This is the longest study we’ve conducted so far of semaglutide for weight loss,” Dr Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s head of development, said in an interview, referring to the active ingredient in Wegovy and the company’s diabetes drug Ozempic.

“We see that once the majority of the weight loss is accrued, you don’t go back and start to increase in weight if you stay on the drug,” he added.

The data could go some way to convince insurers and governments to reimburse Wegovy, which ranges from US$200 (S$270) to almost US$2,000 a month in the 10 countries it has been launched in so far.

Shares were up 1.1 per cent at 12.28am GMT, reaching a two-month high. Analysts and investors said the rise was likely driven by strong data released by the company late on May 13 from a late-stage trial of its haemophilia A drug.

Mr Markus Manns, a portfolio manager at Union Investment in Germany and a Novo Nordisk shareholder, told Reuters that the data, which is better than the drug for the same disease from Swiss pharma company Roche, “unlocks another US$2 billion opportunity” for the company.

Wegovy was the first to market from a newer generation of medicines known as GLP-1 agonists, originally developed for diabetes, that provide a new way to address record obesity rates. Eli Lilly launched its rival drug Zepbound in the United States in December. Neither company has been able to produce enough to meet unprecedented demand.

Dr Simon Cork, senior lecturer in physiology from Anglia Ruskin University, said Britain’s public health service’s decision to limit coverage of the medicine to two years was “because of questionable long-term effectiveness”.

The new data showing benefits continuing to four years may go some way to negating that argument, he said.

Heart benefits

The 17,604-patient trial tested Wegovy not for weight loss, but for its

heart protective benefits

for overweight and obese patients who had pre-existing heart disease, but not diabetes. Participants were not required to track diet and exercise because it was not an obesity study.

Around 17 per cent of trial participants stopped using Wegovy due to side effects, the most common of which was nausea, Novo said in another analysis in the trial published by the drugmaker on May 14.

Patients in the trial, called Select, lost an average of nearly 10 per cent of their total body weight after 65 weeks on Wegovy. That percentage weight loss was roughly sustained year on year until the end of about four years, where weight loss stood at 10.2 per cent, the company said.

A third new analysis on Select published by Novo on May 14 showed that the heart protective benefits of Wegovy to patients in the trial occurred regardless of their weight before starting on the drug and regardless of how much weight they lose on it.

“We now also understand that while we know that body weight loss is important, it’s not the only thing driving the cardiovascular benefit of semaglutide treatment”, Dr Lange told Reuters in the interview.

The Select study showed that Wegovy reduced the risk of a major cardiovascular event such as a stroke by 20 per cent in overweight or obese people with a history of heart disease, news that sent Novo shares soaring 13 per cent to record highs when it was released in August.

Novo says researchers are still working to understand the mechanisms of the cardiovascular protection that semaglutide provides.

Wegovy and Zepbound are being tested to assess their benefits in a variety of other medical uses such as lowering heart attack risk and for sleep apnea and kidney disease.

The weight loss in the heart trial was less than the average of 15 per cent weight loss in earlier Wegovy obesity studies before the drug was launched in the United States in June 2021. REUTERS