Hot topic: Could obesity medicines gobble up other drugs’ profits?

Great news from the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Malaga earlier this week: obesity drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro slash the chances of dying from a range of killer diseases including strokes, heart attacks and various cancers. Roughly speaking, they halve the risk. 

GLP-1s appear to “affect the biology of diseases of ageing”, said Professor John Deanfield, a cardiologist at University College London. 

They could also play a role in helping prevent dementia, while other studies suggest they could help stop addiction too. The list of potential benefits go on and on. 

That’s great if you are Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly. 

But a comment from Dr Louis Aronne of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, the medical school of Cornell University, is likely to strike fear into the hearts of some pharma executives. 

“Use of drugs like this will prevent the need for many other medications, procedures, and surgeries,” he said. 

To date, there has been a tendency to consider weight-loss medications as a wholly new market, treating a “new” disease – obesity, which hasn’t even been considered to be a disease by most people for very long. So there has perhaps been a tendency to view GLP-1s as just adding value to the pharma sector as a whole. 

While there has been concern among some food manufacturers about the potential impact of weight loss medications on sales, and chat about how they are affecting ordering in restaurants, there hasn’t been a huge amount of discussion about what they might do to sales of other drugs. 

But if studies such as those presented at ECO are borne out by longer term data and – crucially – if enough people who are overweight or obese start taking such weight-loss meds for prolonged periods, then that could change the game.  

Specifically, it could turn the situation into a zero-sum game – one in which those companies with the dominant obesity drugs gain hugely, and those whose drugs they displace, lose out. 

First in the firing line (or on the menu if you prefer) would presumably be treatments for cardiovascular diseases. These would then be followed by others – cancer drugs perhaps?  

In an age when we expect demand for cancer drugs to keep rising, due to both ageing populations and increasing rates of obesity, that is a startling thought. 

We are a long way from that world now though. Let’s not forget that only 50,000 people in the UK currently get weight loss drugs on the NHS, even though almost two-thirds of adults in the country are overweight or obese. It’s a similar picture in other western countries. 

In the near future, GLP-1s and their successors will have a limited impact on population-wide health. 

But in the further future? Who knows.