For the last few years, there's been this drug that everyone seems to be talking about.
Oh wow, people with type two diabetes are excited about the potential of once weekly ozimpic.
Ozembic was approved to treat diabetes in the US in twenty seventeen, but the effect it can have on weight loss has become what it's most known for, and you.
May lose weight. In the same one year study, adults lost on average up to twelve pounds.
Oh at twelve pounds.
Well, it may seem like we've been talking about ozembic forever. My colleague Madison Muller, who writes for Bloomberg's Health Team, says it's only really been recently that a lot of people have been talking about this drug.
It's only been within the last five years that we've really started hearing about ozembic, and especially within the last year or two years that this has really taken off in the public consciousness.
And for the last six months, Madison's been writing a lot about ozempic and other drugs like it, like Munjaro and Wagovi.
When I first started covering this beat the only drug that I was really hearing about or that people were talking about was ozempic and then a little bit of Wigo V conversations too, But ozembic is really the drug that started it all. I say that it's kind of like Kleenex, like it's just become the catch all for all of these weight loss drugs and sort of like the whole industry.
But now, years after Ozempic was approved for use in the US, there's a new drug that could threaten its Kleenex like status, a drug that looks poised to steal its market share and become the go to drug in the space. It's called zet Bound, and it's picked up steam on TikTok where people are sharing their experiences taking it.
Hey, it's Karen.
Here's an update my first week on zet bound after being on wogov for over eights.
Now that I picked up my first first description on stet bound, you guys know that I've been on manjarro.
It is going to be called zet bound, and I do not care.
You could call it dookie on a stick and I would still inject this.
Today on the show, how a century long pharmaceutical rivalry gave rise to the weight loss drug craze and why investors and analysts think this latest drug, zet Bound, could lead its manufacturer to become the first ever trillion dollar drug company. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. In a lot of ways, this story is a tale of two pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly
and Novo Nordisk. Both companies have been major innovators in the treatment of diabetes and have been competitors for the past one hundred years. But today we're going to start with Eli Lilly, not only because it's the manufacturer of Zetbound, but also because it's where one of the key breakthroughs behind these types of drugs was discovered. Madison told us she learned about it from a man named Richard D.
Marky.
Richard de Marky was a scientist at Lily for like twenty two years.
His research looked at the body's end acrine system, which creates and releases hormones like insulin, and he and a collaborator filed a patent for something called.
A GLP one receptor agonist drug.
And what GLP one is, it's a gut hormone that helps control blood sugar, helps control insulin.
In the body.
And what it also does is it mimics the effect of eating food. So after you eat, your body releases this GLP one hormone and it signals to the brain that you can stop eating.
And so that's what wigovi and ozembic are.
But Demarki says when he shared this finding with his employer Eli Lilly back in the nineties, they were not interested.
Lily knew nothing with this path but just expired, which was a sign of the fact that they didn't believe that obesity was a disease right, it was still a syndrome. They honestly did not believe that people would take an injection to treat a disease ease that was this benign Yes, I disagree.
De Marki ended up leaving the company to continue research into diabetes and obesity, and the patent he filed expired in twenty seventeen.
Demarki says that after he left Lily, the interest in obesity just sort of ceased at the company.
Jeffrey Emmick, a senior vice president for product development who'd worked at Eli Lilly since the nineties, told Madison, quote, we just didn't think they were going to be that efficacious. But over in Denmark, a different approach was unfolding at Novo Nordisk.
At Novo he had this counterpart, Lottie Knudsen, and she is still at the company. She's still at Novo. She has a leadership role now. And back then she was a young scientist. This was in the nineties and she was also interested in GLP one drugs for obesity, and she encountered similar sort of disbelief you know, at Novo, and they questioned her work, but she had support from Lee Readership and that was sort of what mattered. She got the resources that she needed to keep going with this research.
Madison says. Novo Nordisk's research paid off more than a decade later with a drug called Sexenda.
That was the first GLP one drug ever to be approved by the FDA for weight loss, and that happened in twenty fourteen, and so Novo kept going. They wanted this drug was injected daily. They wanted a drug that could be injected weekly, and so they were trying to change the molecule so that it could be a weekly
injection instead of a daily injection. They changed it slightly, like added a fatty acid chain or something to it and the way that they changed the molecule actually led to a lot more weight loss, so they weren't trying still to develop a more effective weight loss drug. They were trying to make a once weekly version, and they came up with ozempic. Ozempic was the result of that, and the weight loss from ozempic was just substantial, like
it was way more than sax senda. It was super effective, and that sort of started this whole interest and obesity again.
So Novo Nordisk was out as the front runner in the space. But remember Eli Lilly is going to become a big player here too, They just weren't there yet. While Novo Nordisk was working on ozepik, Eli Lilly was actually focused on treating a very different disease.
They were at the time of like twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen, really focused on Alzheimer's. They had for decades poured billions of dollars into Alzheimer's research, so they were really hopeful about this, and all of those trials ended up being failures, like really expensive, disappointing failures.
So right around twenty seventeen, Novo Nordisk is out ahead with ozempic, and Eli Lilly is on its back foot, licking its wounds from its Alzheimer's flops. When Eli Lilly brings in a new CEO, dave Rix, and right away he made weight loss drugs a priority.
He sent his top scientists to go basically do a short stint in diabetes research to see what he could find, see if he could find promising research. And he did, I mean pretty much right away. He found this small study of trizeppetide, which is a GLP one drug combined with another gut hormone called GIP and there was this small study done in healthy people in Singapore just to
see if the drug was safe or not. And what they saw was that people in this study lost so much weight that they had to drop out of the study.
That study was a good start, but Eli Lilly still had to make up for lost time.
They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could, to get a drug on the market as fast as they could, because drug development can take a really long time, like it can take six to eight years, even a decade, and they didn't really have that time.
Zembic was already out there. They needed to do this quickly.
And so what Dan Skavronsky, who is now the chief scientific and chief medical officer at Lily, told me was that he basically told the scientists to go forth with the innovation, do things quickly, and he kind of like freed them from the bureaucratic processes that can bog down drug development at a big company like Lily. And yeah, I mean, these scientists just went really fast. They got a drug on the market quickly, They did these trials quickly.
They also went straight from a diabetes trial into a late stage obesity trial.
They worked with the FDA to speed up the process a little bit too.
And yeah, and then Manduro was approved for diabetes in twenty twenty two, and zet Bound was approved for weight loss last year.
After the break, What set Zetbound apart and why it could make Eli Lilly the first ever trillion dollar drug company.
We're back.
When we left off, Eli Lelly had just brought its new drug, zet Bound, to market, but it was still years behind Novo Nordisk and ozempic. Is it a big advantage for a drug manufacturer to be first to market?
So you would think so, and in some cases it is, But you know, It's unlike other industries where innovating too late is could be a death sentence for some companies. In the drug industry, what we see is that being first to the market has an advantage, but ultimately just having the best drug is what can set a pharmaceutical company apart.
Madison told me, one of the key things to know about zetbound is that it works slightly differently than its main competitors.
Ozepic and Wigovi are GLP one receptor agonist drug, and so what scientists are starting to realize is that by like layering and combining other hormones or other sort of molecules with GLP one, you can get even more weight loss. And so that's what zetbound is. It's a combination of GLP one and another gut hormone called GIP and what we see with that is that the weight loss can reach up to like twenty one percent, and the weight loss that you see from wagovi tops out at around
fifteen percent. And Lily has another drug in the works that combines three different gut hormones and that one is up to a third of your body weight.
Is what patients are losing.
So it's sort of like by layering or combining different hormones together, you can get even more weight loss, which is sort of what we're seeing with zetbound.
As for what this new drug means for Zepbound's parent company, Eli Lilly, Madison told us there's this new acronym that's popping up among investors.
One of the analysts told me that JBL, which stands for just by Lily, is this new acronym that some investors that he's spoken to are saying there's like no limit in how high its stock will go, that it's just going to continue growing. It has a price earnings ratio of around fifty right now, which is really unheard of for a pharma company.
If Eli Lily continues on the trajectory that Wall Street expects it to, how much could it be worth.
If Eli Lilly continues on its current growth trajectory, there are expectations, I guess that it could become the first ever trillion dollar drug company. And there are expectations that its current valuation implies that zeb bound could bring in seventy billion dollars by twenty thirty just one drug alone.
The growth of drugs like zepbound and MCGOV has meant real money for pharmaceutical companies, but their long term success will depend on how many people take them. Some people are deterred by the unpleasant side effects of these drugs, and some are turned off by the price, which can run upwards of one thousand dollars a month in the US, and a lot of private insurers don't cover them well.
After doing all this reporting, what are your takeaways from the story of Lily and Novo and what will you be watching for next?
Yeah, I think the story between the competition between Lily and Novo is not over yet, and it's going to continue for the next decade or even longer.
And what I'm.
Curious to see is sort of how other drug makers now enter this race and who's going to be next. You know, which product ultimately will win, because it might not be one of Lily or Novo's. I mean, Amjin is developing a shot that's taken once a month, and experts are really excited about that because the prospect of a drug being taken less frequently is very enticing and
would likely be also attractive to patients. And so there are these other drugs that are and other companies that are sort of circling, and you know, on the cusp of they're still a little bit further behind Lillian Novo, But it will be interesting to see what's now and how this continues to play out.
Thank you so much, Madison, Thank you, thanks for listening to the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I am Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Caitlin Kenney and Rebecca Greenfield. It was mixed by Alex Suguiera. It was fact checked by Tiffany Choi. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jill Duddy Carly. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemsterborr is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts Special
Thanks to Madison Muller for her reporting. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back tomorrow.