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Roche wants to bring weight loss drugs to market quickly

Roche wants to bring slimming drugs to market quickly
Roche wants to bring slimming drugs to market quickly Keystone-SDA

The Swiss pharmaceutical company wants to speed up the development of its drugs against diabetes and obesity.

Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker told the “Financial Times” that the company’s first anti-obesity drugs would come onto the market “much faster than expected” – possibly by 2028. This booming market is currently dominated by the American company Eli Lilly and the Danish company Novo Nordisk.

In mid-July, Roche once again published positive study data on a potential weight loss drug. This involved the candidate CT-996, which is taken once a day to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. The drug comes from the portfolio of the American company Carmot, which Roche acquired in December for around $3 billion.

Like several anti-obesity drugs in development, CT-996 belongs to the new class of lipid-lowering drugs, the GLP-1 drugs. It achieved significant results in two sub-studies of an ongoing multi-part Phase I clinical trial. Only shortly before this, Roche had published data on its other obesity candidate CT-388, which had been positively received by analysts and investors.

Schinecker told the Financial Times that Roche could have “around seven” drugs from the Carmot acquisition, some of which are in even earlier stages of development. Roche shares have also recently benefited from the trial data.

The multi-billion dollar market for so-called GLP-1 drugs is becoming increasingly competitive. Many pharmaceutical companies, including industry giants Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim, are working on competing products to those of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Adapted from German by DeepL/ac

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