by maggie fick

London: taking patients Novo NordiskPopular Wegovi is Treatment of obesity The company said on Tuesday that after four years of treatment there was an average weight loss of 10 percent.

Novo presents new long-term data European Congress on Obesity The results came from a larger study, in Venice, Italy, most of which was published last year.

“This is our longest study to date semaglutide for weight loss,” Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s head of development, said in an interview, referring to Wegovi and the company’s active ingredient. diabetes medicine Ozempic.

“We see that once most of the weight is lost, you don’t go back and the weight starts to increase if you stay on the drug,” he said.

The data could strengthen the company’s case as it tries to convince insurers and governments to reimburse Wegovi and refute the perception that it is a lifestyle drug.

Wegovi was the first company to bring to market a new generation of drugs called GLP-1 agonist, originally developed for diabetes, offers a new way to address record obesity rates. Eli Lilly launches its rival drug zepbound In the United States in December. No company is able to produce enough to meet the unprecedented demand.

Dr Simon Cork, senior lecturer in physiology at Anglia Ruskin University, said the UK Public Health Service’s decision to limit coverage of the drug to two years was “due to questionable long-term effectiveness”.

He said new data showing benefits lasting up to four years might be a way to refute that argument.

The 17,604-patient trial tested Wegovi not for weight loss but for its heart protective benefits for overweight and obese patients who already had heart disease but did not have diabetes. Participants were not required to track diet and exercise because this was not an obesity study.

Patients in the trial, called SELECT, lost an average of about 10 percent of their total body weight after 65 weeks on Wegovi. The company said the percentage of weight loss remained roughly consistent year-over-year until the end of four years, where weight loss was 10.2 percent.

Wegovi and Zepbound are being tested to assess their benefits in reducing heart attack risk and several other medical uses, such as sleep apnea and kidney disease.

The weight loss in the heart trial was less than the average of 15 percent weight loss in the previous Vegovy obesity study before the drug launched in the United States in June 2021.

(Reporting by Maggie Fick, editing by Bill Berkrot)