Roche shares jump after weight-loss pill shows promise in study
And Working The Drugmakers Are Picture: Astrazeneca Weight On Loss Among Lilly Free Needle Alternatives Eli Pfizer, Also Bloomberg Other
Roche 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 lucrative 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.
The global pharma giant, which has operations in Ireland, saw shares rise as much as 7.4% in early trading, the most since March 2020. The stock is up about 12% since the start of the year. Shares in Novo Nordisk, maker of hit obesity drug Wegovy, fell as much as 5.2% in Copenhagen.
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 $130bn (€119bn) annually by the end of the decade.
Headline results for the Roche pill “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.
Roche said based on the current results, the pill will move into the next stage of drug development.
Pfizer, Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca 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 was 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.
Roche acquired the drug candidate among others when it bought Carmot Therapeutics for as much as $3.1bn in January. The deal opened “a whole new vista”, Roche said earlier this year.