Eli Lilly and drug makers show data on weight loss drugs

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Good day! Eli Lilly, New Nordisk and other drugmakers showed encouraging data on weight loss and diabetes drugs last week.

The companies shared their results at the American Diabetes Association's annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, the world's largest scientific conference focused on diabetes research, prevention and care.

The drug developments come amid growing investor interest in the treatment of metabolic diseases and, specifically, in a class of trendy drugs called GLP-1.

But drugmakers have introduced treatments that use different approaches than traditional GLP-1, such as Novo Nordisk's popular weight-loss shot Wegovy and its diabetes counterpart Ozempic. The two drugs mimic a hormone produced in the intestine to suppress a person's appetite.

Companies are also moving away from focusing solely on weight loss in trials. Some drug makers are examining the potential of their drugs to treat other health conditions, while others are seeing whether a drug can preserve lean muscle mass in patients while promoting weight loss.

Here are some of the highlights from the conference:

• Eli Lilly released additional data from two late-stage clinical trials showing that its weight-loss injection Zepbound helped resolve a common sleep disorder called obstructive sleep apnea in nearly half of patients. The company said Zepbound could get expanded approval in the U.S. for that use by the end of the year.
• Nordisk presented the results of key clinical trials on semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic, in diabetes, obesity and chronic kidney disease. That includes full results from a late-stage trial of Ozempic in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease. The weekly injection significantly reduced the risk of kidney disease progression and death from kidney or cardiovascular complications in patients. New data also showed that those benefits are consistent regardless of whether patients are also treated with a class of diabetes drugs called sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors. Novo Nordisk expects U.S. regulators to make a decision on expanded approval for that use in January 2025.
• Zealand Pharmaceuticals presented positive results from an early-stage clinical trial of its experimental weekly injection of petrelintide, which targets the hormone amylin. The drug caused 8.6% weight loss at 16 weeks, compared with 1.7% among patients taking a placebo. The Danish company sees this drug as an alternative to GLP-1 for weight loss.
• altimmune released full data from a mid-stage clinical trial of its experimental obesity drug pemvidutide. The treatment preserved lean muscle mass while promoting weight loss in adults with obesity, with most of the reduction coming from fat. A subgroup analysis of 50 patients found that only 21.9% of their weight loss was due to lean muscle mass.
• Viking therapeutics revealed preclinical data on a “series” of experimental drugs called dual amylin and calcitonin receptor agonists, or DACRAs. The results show that the company's DACRAs reduced the amount of food the rats ate in the first three days after a single dose. After three days post-dose, the rats saw up to an 8% reduction in body weight compared to rats given CagriSema, Novo Nordisk's experimental weight loss drug.
• Gilead Jefferies presented data from a preclinical study on its experimental oral GLP-1 called GS-4571. The trial found that the treatment improved glucose tolerance in mice and caused a 5% to 6% weight loss over five days, according to a Sunday note from Jefferies analysts. The note, which cited a poster at the conference, added that obese monkeys experienced an 8% weight loss after 30 days.

Feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas, and facts to Annika at [email protected].

Oracle on Monday expanded access to its AI-powered tool called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which aims to save doctors time by automating some of their documentation.

Administrative tasks, such as paperwork, are often a burden for healthcare workers, with nearly 65% ​​of doctors feeling they are a leading cause of burnout, according to a February survey from Athenahealth. Doctors spend an average of 15 hours per week outside of their normal schedule to maintain their workload, according to the survey.

For example, Dr. Ryan McFarland, a family physician at Hudson Physicians in Wisconsin, sees an average of 25 patients per day. He has to write a clinical note after each appointment to record what happened and follow-up, which he said amounts to “several hours” of documentation each day.

“That's just documentation, it's not about responding to lab results, patient questions, messages,” he told CNBC in an interview. “It can be very complicated trying to complete the note and documentation in addition to providing patient care.”

oracle said Your Digital Clinical Assistant can help alleviate this administrative burden. Doctors can access the tool through an app on their phone and press a button to log their patient visits. Once they stop recording, Oracle AI automatically generates a clinical note based on the appointment for physicians to They no longer need to write it themselves.

Only approved representatives of healthcare organizations will be able to access the recordings, Oracle said.

The assistant works in conjunction with Oracle's electronic health record, so doctors can also verbally ask it to obtain information about a patient's medical history, such as their latest blood test results, the company said. In other words, doctors can spend less time searching through records for the relevant information they need.

Oracle has been testing the tool with 13 healthcare organizations, including Hudson Physicians. Oracle said its assistant has saved doctors an average of four and a half minutes per patient, as well as 20% to 40% of their daily documentation time. The tool is generally available in outpatient clinics or clinics that are not attached to hospitals, starting Monday.

“This will be kind of a practice requirement in our business going forward,” McFarland said. “The accuracy of the notes is much better, you catch things that you might forget to document. It saves a lot of time.”

McFarland said he had worked with other dictation tools in the past, but the software often caused errors and had problems with rapid speech. He has also worked with human scribes who are more accurate, although he said they can be time-consuming to train and difficult to keep employed. Oracle's assistant serves as the equivalent of a human writer, McFarland said.

“I think from a grade generation standpoint, we're 90 to 100 percent of where we need to be,” he said.

McFarland said he believes the tool works well with complex medical terminology and can even capture abbreviations. He said he believes there is room for improvement in some aspects of specialty care, as well as how the assistant can help with other functionality, such as placing image orders and sending referrals and reminders back to the clinic.

Some Hudson Physicians providers are more particular about the style of their notes than others, so McFarland said some doctors still spend time editing. Still, the clinic has seen a 100% adoption rate for Oracle Assistant, something McFarland said he had never seen before.

“It's been a game changer for us and we will continue to use it,” he said.

Please feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas, or information to Ashley at [email protected].