Experimental weight loss drug beats Ozempic and Wegovy in early study

Pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk is not resting on its laurels when it comes to weight loss. The Danish company just released preliminary data suggesting that its experimental drug amycretin may help people lose even more weight than its already successful drug semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. And even better, amycretin is taken as a tablet, unlike the injections required for Ozempic and Wegovy.

Researchers presented the company's Amycertin data from a Phase I trial in obesity patients this week at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. The people taking Amycretin lost an average of 13.1 percent of their body weight over 12 weeks – far more than the average weight loss in people taking a placebo and on track to perhaps even surpass the success of semaglutide.

By comparison, clinical trials found that people taking high doses of semaglutide lost an average of about 6% of their body weight after three months and about 15% of their body weight after six months. This raises the tantalizing possibility that people taking amycretin could expect to lose 25% or more of their body weight over the same period. This is an average weight loss that is unmatched by any of the currently available anti-obesity drugs and is comparable to the most effective bariatric surgery.

“It's almost like a magic pill,” Susan Spratt, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of the Population Health Management Office at Duke Health, told NBC News.

Novo Nordisk's data still needs to be reviewed by outside experts, which is an important part of the scientific process. And it's still only Phase I data, which is expressly designed only to tell us whether a drug is safe to continue testing in people, not to confirm its effectiveness. In this regard, the company reported that the side effects observed with the drug were generally mild to moderate and comparable to those of semaglutide. The most common side effects of semaglutide are gastrointestinal in nature, such as nausea and diarrhea, although these symptoms subside over time.

The pharmacology behind amycretin supports the idea that it could beat semaglutide. Semaglutide mimics the gut hormone GLP-1, which helps regulate our blood sugar and hunger, among other things. But amycretin is designed to mimic both GLP-1 and another hormone that is critical to regulating our hunger and blood sugar: amylin. Eli Lilly's rival drug tirzepatide, sold under the names Mounjaro and Zepbound, employs a similar dual-action strategy (but using GLP and the hormone GIP) and has also been shown to lead to greater weight loss on average than semaglutide.

Before amycretin can be made available to the public, much more human data confirming its efficacy and safety is needed. But this is just one of many promising approaches for the future of weight loss treatment being developed by Novo Nordisk and its competitors. For example, another of the company's candidates, CagriSema, combines three drugs that mimic our gut hormones. Early results suggest similar weight loss to that seen with amycretin.