New drug MariTide helped patients lose up to 20% of body weight in a year—offering a simpler, once-a-month alternative to current weekly injections.
United States: Weight-loss drugs that do not need to be injected on a weekly basis might be coming soon. Every month, one group of people in a phase 2 clinical trial took a new drug called MariTide and, after twelve months, lost approximately 20 percent of their body weight, researchers said in a study published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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The MariTide is one of a new generation of diabetes and obesity drugs being produced by Amgen that was a topic of a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in Chicago that closed Monday.
According to Dr. Michelle Ponder, who is an assistant professor of medicine at Duke University in Durham, N.C., “The more options, the better,” US News reported.
Contrary to the GLP-1-based drugs, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, which require weekly injections, the MariTide injection consists of a monoclonal antibody that allows the drug to remain in the body longer.
The bottom line is this: people will not have to take it every week, will they? Ponder said that would be a windfall to both patients and prescribers alike.
According to her, “It’s always just easier for patients to only have to take something once per month, US News reported.
“A lot of patients we see in endocrinology are diabetes patients, and so they’d be taking multiple shots of insulin per day. And so, every last shot matters, even if it’s three fewer shots per month,” she added.
In the phase 2 trial, there were close to 600 adults where. Some had type 2 diabetes and were obese, and others were obese only.
Others were to be given doses of a year of MariTide monthly; others were to be given a placebo. Doses of certain patients within the obesity population were gradually increased over a range of weeks.
The outcomes: Within a year, the subjects with obesity without any co-comorbid conditions lost a mean of up to 20 percent of body weight on MariTide as compared to 2.6 percent among those on placebo.
The mean weight loss among diabetes subjects was 17 percent, and the placebo was 1.4 percent.