Pfizer execs talk Metsera obesity drug
Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer, speaks at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival on May 22, 2024 in New York, USA.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
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Pfizer This week we made one thing clear: We are officially back in the obesity race.
The drugmaker is focused on bringing treatments to market with its $10 billion acquisition of obesity biotech Metsera. Published on Tuesday Promising phase two trial data with single injectionCalled PF′3944, it is the furthest along in development.
The experimental drug produced significant weight loss when taken once a month in a mid-stage trial; This provides early evidence that the injection can be administered less frequently than existing drugs without compromising efficacy. That could be a boon for Pfizer after it faced multiple setbacks trying to win a slice of a market dominated by Novo’s new daily pill as well as weekly shots from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
In the ongoing phase two study, patients with obesity or overweight lost 12.3% of their weight compared to placebo at week 28. The company said no plateau was observed after patients switched to monthly dosing; This suggests that weight loss is expected to continue as the study continues through week 64.
But investors are still looking for full data from this trial, which is scheduled to be presented at a medical conference in June. Pfizer also plans to launch 10 phase three studies of the injection, with the goal of receiving the first of several potential approvals in 2028.
I spoke with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and other top executives about this week’s data and the company’s broader obesity strategy. Here’s what they had to say.
A potential “best in class” product
Bourla told CNBC that data shows the monthly product has “a very competitive profile in terms of tolerability and effectiveness.”
Pfizer plans to use a higher dose of the drug in phase three trials, and Bourla said the drug will produce efficacy and tolerability data that are “perhaps best-in-class, so better than anything else” and taken less frequently. The company’s modeling predicts that the higher dose could lead to a 16% weight loss at week 28.
In the phase two trial, patients began weekly injections of the drug for 12 weeks before switching to once-monthly dosing.
Pfizer’s chief internal medicine officer, Dr. Pfizer also plans to study people taking current weekly GLP-1s and give them the option to switch to the company’s monthly vaccine, Jim List said.
List said that’s one of the selling points of the company’s injection: It can serve as a more convenient maintenance treatment for patients to transition into.
“If you say listen, I can give you one of these medications. You will take it once a week for the rest of your life. But you will take the other one once a week, and you can change it to once a month. Which one do you want?” The list said. “He will always be the one with more options.
“Weekly administration doesn’t work for everyone,” he added, because some patients have to travel and can’t keep their injections refrigerated.
People who receive weekly injections are more likely to switch to another vaccine instead of the oral option, Bourla said.
“It will be for oral people, but they didn’t start with injections,” he said. “As a result, I think monthly or longer-term products will probably become the standard, and we are the first and hopefully the best.”
Combination regimes
A key part of Pfizer’s strategy for the PF′3944 injection was to combine it with another drug that targets a gut hormone called amylin, List said.
“We expect to achieve greater weight loss with this combination than we did with GLP-1 alone,” he said.
Amylin is a hormone secreted in the pancreas along with insulin to suppress appetite and reduce food intake. Amylin treatments have a similar effect to GLP-1s like Lilly’s Zepbound and Mounjaro, but some analysts and researchers say it may be easier for patients to tolerate and may help them preserve lean muscle mass.
On Tuesday, Pfizer said preliminary data showed that the two drugs together caused an additional 5% weight loss compared to placebo on day 8. Amylin alone also showed 8.4% weight loss on day 36.
Both drugs are extremely long-acting; That means they are designed to stay active in the body longer than existing treatments such as Novo Wegovy and can be taken once a month.
Pfizer plans to share more data about its amylin drug at a medical conference in June. The company advanced the product to phase two trials in the first half of this year, List said.
Three monthly doses of GLP-1 injection
On Tuesday, Pfizer also unveiled a potential GLP-1 injection that is dosed quarterly (every three months) rather than monthly or weekly.
The injection will be “ultra-ultra-long-acting,” List said, so Pfizer will find a way for the drug to “degrade more slowly in the human body and certainly last longer” than PF′3944.
Chief Scientific Officer Chris Boshoff told CNBC that the vast majority of patients would prefer the injection, and that “obviously monthly would be preferable to weekly, and quarterly would probably be better than monthly.”
However, List said this drug is still early days.
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