On November 4, AstraZeneca made an announcement stating that promising safety and tolerability data was observed in an early clinical development of drugs for weight loss AZD5004. The medicine was acquired last year from Eccogene of China for a fee worth $2 billion and is presently undergoing evaluation in a Phase I clinical trial of 72 insufficiencies, both healthy non-obese subjects as well as type 2 diabetes patients. AZD5004 was tested in a clinical trial as a treatment which is given only once a day to the subjects. There were mild events which were associated with GLP-1 receptor agents and which included symptoms such as nausea and vomiting.
Nevertheless, AstraZeneca reported that there were no severe adverse events during the duration of the trial. The reassuring safety profile of the pill led the firm to take it to the next phase of the process to conduct clinical trials which is the phase II trial which is focused on determining the drug’s effectiveness in inducing weight loss in obese and overweight subjects. This phase II trial shall approximately last until the elapse of December 2025.
As the Executive Vice President responsible for R&D at AstraZeneca, Sharon Barr reiterated AZD5004’s potential to play a role in offering less invasive solutions than injectable weight-loss medicines such as Zepbound by Eli Lilly and Wegovy by Novo Nordisk. She added that the oral pill may widen the pool of patients who can benefit from the medication, especially patients who would rather take a pill every day than have an injected therapy.
AstraZeneca’s ambition on obesity can further be illustrated by its decision to bring forward the late-stage development of AZD5004, given that it is an area where the company has not been successful compared to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly which have weight-loss drugs in the market. Nonetheless, the firm believes in this case that the differentiating factor for AZD5004 will be the disease mitigation potential that exists with other small molecules, given the fact that over 60% of obese individuals have at least one other condition.
AstraZeneca has also published clinical trial data from size of Phase I studies of two other plans for treating obesity in addition to AZD5004. One of them, AZD6234 acts on a peptide hormone located in the pancreas that functions to reduce hunger while the other AZD9550 acts on GLP-1 and one more obesity-linked hormone. These two therapies have been proven to be safe and tolerable, with Phase II studies expected to begin in the next few months.
