United States: The latest data revealed that those patients who have been taking Wegovy of Novo Nordisk as an obesity treatment have seen an average of ten percent loss in weight after four years of its use.
The treatment has been said to potentially improve the drugmaker’s case to insurers and governments to cover the cost of the effective but expensive drug.
More about the study
The drugmaker from Denmark has presented a novel long-term data at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice, Italy on Tuesday. It was based on a new analysis from a large study, the substantial results of whose were published last year.
Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s head of development, stated, “This is the longest study we’ve conducted so far of semaglutide for weight loss,” as Reuters stated.
He added, “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.”
Study data may influence the insurers
The data can persuade the insurers and the governments about several aspects, such as the product could be approved for reimbursement by the governments or insurers as the rate per month is between USD 200 and almost USD 2,000. This data has been gathered from ten countries where it has been launched in so far.
Shares were up 1.1 percent at 12:28 GMT, reaching a satisfactory value for the last two months. Analysts and investors concluded that the rise was most likely stimulated by the positive results presented on Monday from a final study on their hemophilia A drug, which was conducted at the end of the previous week.
Markus Manns, portfolio manager at Union Investment in Germany and a shareholder of the drug, told Reuters that the data was better than the drug for the same disease from Swiss pharma company Roche, “unlocks another USD 2 billion opportunity” for the company.
Dr. Simon Cork, who is a Senior Lecturer in Physiology from the Anglia Ruskin University, has to say about Britain’s choice to pay for the drug for only two years and only when the drug shows its effectiveness. He added, “It’s due to the fact that the long-term effectiveness of this medicine hasn’t been proven to be 100% to them”.
A portfolio manager at Union Investment in Germany and a Novo Nordisk shareholder, Markus Manns, said that the data, which is better than the drug for the same disease from Swiss pharma company Roche, “unlocks another $2 billion opportunity” for the company.
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 USD 2 billion opportunity” for the company.
The study revealed Wegovy’s heart benefits
The trial of 17,604 patients with Wegovy was analyzed for not just weight loss but ‘heart-protective’ effects, mainly for overweight and obese individuals already diagnosed with heart diseases without diabetes.
This did not require them to fill in journals on diet and workout because that is not the main study of obesity.
A total of about 17 percent of trial participants had to stop using Wegovy due to experiencing unwanted effects, the most common of which was nausea, according to the second analysis conducted by Novo in one of the trials published on Tuesday.
The study revealed that in 65 weeks, Wegovy patients saw a reduction in their weight by an average of almost 10 percent from their initial weight. Therefore, that percentage of weight loss till this stage was roughly constant in an annual baseline, and around the four-year mark, the weight loss reached the magnitude of 10.2 percent, the company said.
Lange said, “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,” as Reuters reported.