A daily pill from Eli Lilly lowered blood sugar levels and induced weight loss in people with Type 2 diabetes, the company announced Thursday.
The experimental pill, called orforglipron, is a GLP-1 drug — the same class of medicine as the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.
Orforglipron is taken orally, however, not as a weekly injection.
“Everybody knows GLP-1s now, and they’re sort of famous as injectable peptide drugs, but we’ve engineered this now into a new kind of molecule that can be taken as a pill form,” Dr. Dan Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, said in an interview.
If it is approved, Lilly’s drug would be the second oral GLP-1 drug available in the United States. The first, Rybelsus, made by Novo Nordisk, contains semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. Rybelsus is approved for Type 2 diabetes.
Lilly said in a news release that in a phase 3 clinical trial, orforglipron lowered A1C levels by 1.6% after 40 weeks compared with a placebo. The full results of the trial were not available to review.
A1C is a measure of a person’s average blood sugar levels over the previous two to three months, according to the American Diabetes Association. An A1C below 5.7% is considered normal; a result of 6.5% or above is in the range for diabetes. Results that fall between those values are in the prediabetes range.
More than 65% of the participants taking orforglipron had A1C readings equal to or less than 6.5% after 40 weeks.
Participants who received the highest dose of the drug lost up to 16 pounds, or 7.9% of their body weight, over the study period.
Lilly said the results of the clinical trial will be published in a peer-reviewed journal and presented at the American Diabetes Association conference in June.
Dr. Christopher McGowan, a gastroenterologist who runs a weight loss clinic in Cary, North Carolina, called Lilly’s results “very encouraging.”
The reduction in A1C “is comparable to what we see with injectable GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, though perhaps slightly less than what’s seen with dual agonists like Mounjaro,” said McGowan, who was not involved in the trial.
A pill, McGowan added, has several advantages over an injectable drug. For the drugmaker, it is easier to manufacture and distribute. For some patients, it may be less intimidating.
“Some patients are hesitant to start an injectable therapy, no matter how effective it is,” he said. “Having a pill as an option could reduce that barrier.”
Lilly is also researching how well orforglipron works for weight loss alone in people without Type 2 diabetes. In phase 2 clinical trial — the findings of which were published in 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine — daily orforglipron was found to reduce body weight by an average of 9.4% to 14.7% after 36 weeks, depending on the dose.
Dr. Susan Spratt, an endocrinologist and senior medical director at Duke Health who was not involved in the trial, questioned whether orforglipron had any drug-drug interactions — as is the case, she said, with Rybelsus, which can interact with certain thyroid medications.
Lilly said Thursday that phase 3 results from the weight loss trial will be available later this year. It plans to submit the drug to the Food and Drug Administration as a weight loss treatment by the end of 2025. In 2026, it plans to apply for approval as a diabetes treatment.
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