The Food and Drug Administration Approves Obesity Drug Created by Eli Lilly

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved an obesity drug from the company Eli Lilly that will be a direct competitor to the wildly popular Wegovy.
The drug is called tirzepatide and will be sold under the name Zepbound. It joins a class of new medications that are transforming obesity, a condition that affects 100 million American adults and is linked to a spectrum of diseases including diabetes, heart disease, sleep apnea, liver disease, kidney disease and joint pain.

Patients who used tirzepatide lost an average of 18 percent of their body weight, according to the F.D.A., when it was taken at its highest dose in a drug trial. That’s compared with Wegovy, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, which produced an average 15 percent weight loss.

The F.D.A. approved Zepbound for people with obesity and for those who are overweight and have at least one obesity-related condition.

Tirzepatide is already approved for diabetes under the brand name Mounjaro where it competes with Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug semaglutide, known better as Ozempic. But until now, Wegovy, also semaglutide but with a higher maximum dose than Ozempic, was the only approved drug that could safely elicit substantial weight loss in people with obesity alone.

No drug has ever before shown such a profound weight loss.
For Eli Lilly, the results were a culmination of research that began a decade ago. But like Novo Nordisk, the company was trying to produce a new diabetes drug.

The hope is that Zepbound can reduce the chances that people with obesity will develop the potentially deadly complications that accompany the condition.

But Zepbound is only the beginning for Eli Lilly. The company and other pharmaceutical manufacturers are working on drugs that could be even more powerful.