A new drug from California-based pharma company Amgen, which has concluded a phase II trial, shows promise as a powerful treatment for obesity. With just a once-monthly shot of 'MariTide,' participants in the study lost as much as 16% of their body weight over the course of a year.
That's comparable to the average results seen by folks who take the popular weight loss medication Ozempic once a week. By contrast, a monthly dosage is easier to stick with, and can potentially be made available more easily to patients in remote areas where medical supplies are delivered less frequently.
The phase 2 trial saw 592 participants aged over 18 and with a body mass index or BMI (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) higher than 30. A number of them were both obese and suffered from Type 2 Diabetes.
The results are rather encouraging: obese participants in the experimental group who received an injection of the treatment every four weeks were found, on average, to have lost between 12.3% to 16.2% of their body weight at the end of a year. That's a lot more than those in the control group who received a placebo and lost only 2.5% of their weight on average.
Participants with both obesity and diabetes lost only slightly less than those without diabetes. What's more, the participants didn't reach a weight plateau at the end of a year, which means they could potentially continue to lose weight with this treatment. The researchers' results appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine this week.
So how does it work? MariTide, short for Maridebart Cafraglutide, combines two approaches to signaling the body's systems for controlling hunger and fullness. The first is glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (or GLP-1 RAs), which mimic a naturally occurring hormone to let your brain know when your stomach is actually full. These are the same active ingredients found in Ozempic, and they help you feel fuller for longer, thereby helping you reduce your food intake.
The next is a component that blocks another receptor, called the GIP (glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide) receptor. Instead of activating this receptor (like some other weight-loss drugs do), MariTide specifically antagonizes it, meaning it stops its natural action.
Acting on evidence from studies in animals, which have shown that blocking the GIP pathway in the brain helps contribute to weight loss when combined with the GLP-1 action, MariTide influences the signals between your brain and your metabolism to help you lose weight more effectively.
Since MariTide has been formulated as a long-acting drug with an extended half-life, in which a small protein is linked to a larger antibody, it can circulate in your body longer. That makes it effective as a once-monthly medication, which should be easier for people to adhere to as a course of treatment over longer periods of time for significant results.
It's worth noting that gastrointestinal side effects were also common in participants who received MariTide shots, but they became less frequent at lower doses and when those doses were slowly increased over time.
The researchers working on MariTide are currently preparing for a 72-week phase 3 trial, and evaluating if the drug can help people lose more weight than the ~16% they shed in the phase II trial. They're also exploring its effectiveness among people with heart disease and obstructive sleep apnea.
This is one among several new approaches to tackling weight loss through medication being investigated at the moment. We recently covered another drug in the same class as semaglutide out of China that's just wrapped up its phase III trial. Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, revealed three new weight loss drugs in the works this week. Meanwhile, researchers at Monash University have developed an oral medication that can help treat diabetes and weight loss without impacting muscle mass.
Source: Amgen