A team of scientists was crunching Danish health registry data several years ago when it noticed something surprising: Diabetes patients who’d used Novo Nordisk A/S’s last-generation diabetes medicine Victoza or similar GLP-1 drugs appeared to be getting dementia at noticeably lower rates than those treating their diabetes another way. Specifically, adults who’d been taking the injectable for two years had about a 20% lower risk of a dementia diagnosis. “That is in and of itself not proof,” says Martin Holst Lange, the drugmaker’s chief scientific officer. But “it did catch our attention.” Novo was already looking into whether its newer GLP-1 drugs could help patients with obesity-adjacent disorders of the heart, liver and joints. Spurred in part by the analysis of the curious Danish data (which Novo helped publish), it decided to test the drugs’ effects on Alzheimer’s disease as well.
Those trial results are due out this fall, and if they show what the company hopes they do, GLP-1s could revolutionize the treatment of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. It’s in no way a sure thing, but if it works, the payoff could be huge. Analysts at UBS Group AG estimate a 1 in 10 chance that the company is able to generate an additional $15 billion in annual sales for Alzheimer’s treatment. “We are excited about this,” Novo’s Lange says. “We also see it as very, very high risk.”