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Pharma companies need to move beyond the “weight loss Olympics” and focus on more durable treatments with fewer side effects, according to the chief executive of Zealand Pharma, which this year agreed a $5.3bn obesity partnership with Roche.
Adam Steensberg, whose Copenhagen-listed group agreed the deal to develop a new weight-loss drug petrelintide in March, said the number of people who stopped using the current blockbuster drugs because of side effects represented an opportunity to offer something more tolerable.
“We need to get away from the weight-loss Olympics, which is about how fast and rapid and how deep you can go . . . We need to get into durability and quality of the weight loss,” Steensberg told the Financial Times ahead of Zealand’s capital markets day on Thursday.
Steensberg claimed data suggested 50 per cent of patients who stopped taking existing GLP-1-based weight-loss drugs did so because of side effects.
In the coming year, Zealand expects phase 2 clinical trial data for petrelintide and phase 3 data for survodutide, a drug licensed to German company Boehringer Ingelheim, which is being tested for the treatment of obesity and MASH, an associated liver disease.
Zealand’s share price has fallen nearly 30 per cent this year. Steensberg said this could be partly explained by “all the uncertainty and all the investments being made into AI” which has caused “cyclical swings” for companies like Zealand with “limited news flow”.
Petrelintide is based on the hormone amylin which makes people feel full more quickly and for longer when they eat. The most popular drugs for weight loss and type 2 diabetes currently on the market — Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound — belong to a class of medicines based on the gut hormone GLP-1, which suppresses appetite.
Studies have found that amylin-based weight-loss treatments can cause fewer side effects than GLP-1 drugs.
Steensberg said Zealand was “certain that the GLP-1s will not be able to solve the global obesity pandemic because people cannot stay on these therapies for a long run”.
With petrelintide not expected on the market until 2029, by which time generic versions of current blockbuster weight-loss drugs could also be available, Zealand’s flagship product will face stiff competition. Steensberg said he relished the challenge and drew a parallel with consumer behaviours in another market: “There are a lot of cheap used cars today, but many people still buy a new car because they want a different driving experience.”