GLP-1 Drug War: Obese Patients Are Typically Twice as Likely To Lose 15% Or More of Their Body Weight With Eli Lilly and Company’s Mounjaro Drug as Opposed to Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic

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With around $100 billion in annual sales by the end of this decade up for grabs, the GLP-1 drug war for the global waistline is heating up. Around two weeks back, Novo Nordisk created a media spectacle out of a study that claimed its GLP-1 weight loss drug could slash death risk from heart disease by up to 20 percent. This salvo was apparently fired in response to the steeply discounted price at which Eli Lilly and Company began marketing its own GLP-1 drug. Well, today, the American pharma giant is again attacking Novo Nordisk's proverbial front lines, resplendent in the appropriate war regalia.

Glucagon-Like Peptide-1, or GLP-1 for short, plays an important role in regulating hunger. This hormone forms the bedrock of Novo Nordisk's Semaglutide offering, marketed under Ozempic and Wegovy labels.

Over the years, Eli Lilly and Company has unveiled various offerings that supplement GLP-1's ability to reduce the craving for food with a cocktail of other hormones. For instance, its Mounjaro (Tirzepatide) injections leverage GLP-1 as well as Glucose-dependent Insulinotropic Polypeptide (GIP) – to control type-2 diabetes by regulating blood sugar levels. Retatutide, another offering by Eli Lilly and Company, is currently undergoing clinical trials and supposedly offers superior results by targeting three different hunger-regulating hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and Glucagon.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. In our last post on this topic, we had noted that insurers remain reluctant to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight management, owing to their sky-high prices. In a bid to attract these crucial