Eli Lilly’s highly anticipated GLP-1 drug retatrutide helped people with Type 2 diabetes lose up to 60 pounds, or about 23% of their body weight, according to late-stage trial results published Tuesday in The Lancet.It’s the most weight loss ever recorded in a drug trial for diabetes patients, a group that often has a harder time losing weight.
In clinical trials for semaglutide and tirzepatide, people with Type 2 diabetes lost up to 10% (21 pounds) and 15% (34 pounds) of their body weight, respectively.(Those are not direct comparisons, as the drugs were not evaluated in head-to-head clinical trials.)Retatrutide “is truly an advance in diabetes care,” said Dr.
Susan Spratt, an endocrinologist and the senior medical director for the Population Health Management Office at Duke Health in North Carolina.She was not involved in the trial and does not receive money from Eli Lilly.
“It rivals gastric bypass surgery without the surgery.”Spratt said many diabetes medications, such as insulin, cause weight gain.“It can be discouraging to manage your diabetes well but gain weight,” she said.Lilly’s trial included more than 1,110 patients who had an average starting weight of about 234 pounds and an average body mass index, or BMI, of about 38.People were randomly assigned to take one of three weekly doses of retatrutide or a placebo for 80 weeks.
By the end of the trial, more than half of participants’ BMI fell below 30, the cutoff for obesity.Results from another trial, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found retatrutide helped patients without Type 2 diabetes who have obesity or are overweight lose up to 70 pounds, or 25% of their body weight on average, after 80 weeks.That data included a subset of patients with severe obesity, who lost up to 85 pounds, or 30% of their body weight, after 104 weeks — the most weight loss ever recorded in a medication trial and on par with bariatric surgery.
Like semaglutide and tirzepatide,...