A GLP-1 drug called orforglipron—taken in pill form once a day—has been shown to help with “significant” weight loss in people with obesity.
In a multinational trial of around 3,000 adults, a 72-week treatment with orforglipron led to reductions in body weight of up to 11.2 percent depending on the dose, with side effects similar to other GLP-1 drugs.
Orforglipron works on the same receptor as semaglutide (licensed for diabetes under the name Ozempic and for weight loss under Wegovy).
But unlike those drugs, which in pill form have restrictions around the timing of meals and the amount of water you can drink, orforglipron can be taken without restrictions on food or water intake.
“After 72 weeks of treatment, all the patients in the three orforglipron groups had a significant and clinically meaningful dose-dependent reduction in body weight,” the authors said in a statement.
Orforglipron is a small-molecule, oral glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist. “This pill can be easily made, administered and distributed,” he added.
In the double-blind trial, a total of 3,127 patients with obesity but not diabetes in the USA, China, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Slovakia and Taiwan underwent randomization.
The authors examined the safety and efficacy of once-daily orforglipron at doses of 6, 12 or 36 mg, compared with a placebo group, alongside a healthy diet and physical activity for 72 weeks.
The average change in body weight from baseline to week 72 was a 7.5 percent reduction with 6mg of orforglipron, 8.4 percent with 12mg of orforglipron and 11.2 percent with 36mg of orforglipron, as compared with a 2.1 percent reduction among the placebo group.
For those patients in the orforglipron 36mg group, 54.6 percent had a reduction of 10 percent or more of body weight, 36 percent had a reduction of 15 percent or more and 18.4 percent had a reduction of 20 percent or more, compared with 12.9 percent, 5.9 percent and 2.8 percent of the patients, respectively, for the placebo.