(Bloomberg) -- Roche Holding AG shares jumped after its experimental weight loss pill showed meaningful weight reduction in an early stage study among obesity patients, setting up the Swiss drugmaker as a challenger in the field.
Patients who took the oral medication, CT-996, once a day for four weeks lost on average more than 7% of their starting weight, compared with a little over 1% weight loss in patients who received a placebo, the Swiss drugmaker said in a statement Wednesday.
Roche rose as much as 7.4% in early trading, the most since March 2020. The stock is up about 13% since the start of the year. Shares in Novo Nordisk A/S, maker of hit obesity drug Wegovy, slid as much as 5.2% in Copenhagen. Eli Lilly & Co., which sells the newest obesity blockbuster, Zepbound, fell 3.7% in premarket trading in New York at 8:05 a.m. local time.
In search of a turnaround after a series of trial failures in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, Roche has thrown itself into the hottest field in pharmaceuticals: obesity drugs. An oral medicine is one of the as-yet-untapped areas in a weight-loss market that Goldman Sachs estimates may reach $130 billion annually by the end of the decade.
Roche will move as quickly as possible to bring its pill to patients and anticipates starting the next stage of drug development in 2025, said Manu Chakravarthy, the drugmaker’s global head of cardiovascular, renal and metabolism product development. The results put Roche in a position to offer patients a “mix and match” approach with both a pill and injectable for weight loss, he said. The pill works the same way as Novo’s Wegovy, while Roche’s shot — which had positive early results in May — works in a similar way as Lilly’s Zepbound.
Roche acquired both assets in its $3.1 billion purchase of Carmot Therapeutics Inc. The Swiss drugmaker is still in the market for more experimental weight-loss compounds to fill out its portfolio and remains open to more deals the size of Carmot, said Chakravarthy, a Big Pharma veteran who joined Roche from Carmot.
“We have the backbone of what we need,” he said. “We will figure out what we need to augment the backbone.”
Growing Obesity Drug Market
This week’s results “suggest a competitive profile,” Jefferies analysts wrote in a report, saying they await further details on any side effects among the study’s 25 participants with obesity.
Pfizer Inc., Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca Plc are among the other drugmakers also working on needle-free weight-loss alternatives. Pills may eventually make up about a third of the obesity drug market, according to Pfizer, which last week said it’s moving forward with its own pill.
Roche’s experimental capsule, being developed to treat both type-2 diabetes and obesity, was found to be well tolerated in the study, comparable with similar GLP-1 drugs, Roche said. Crucially, the pill could potentially be taken any time during the day — not only on an empty stomach — which could make it a convenient option for long-term maintenance treatment after patients have already lost weight using injected drugs, the company said.
--With assistance from Damian Garde.
(Updates with Eli Lilly shares in the third paragraph, Roche executive in the fifth. A previous version corrected date of Carmot deal.)
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