Eli Lilly on Wednesday said that its investigational drug was more effective at lowering blood sugar and cutting weight than Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic in a large diabetes study, further boosting the competitive profile of its medicine.
In the head-to-head study, people on the highest dose of Lilly’s drug, called retatrutide, saw a 2.2 percentage-point reduction in a measure of blood sugar called A1c after 80 weeks, while those on Ozempic saw a 1.8 percentage-point reduction.
Those on the highest dose of retatrutide also lost 20.9% of their weight, a highly significant amount considering that people with diabetes don’t tend to lose much weight on drugs. Meanwhile, those taking Ozempic lost 9.4% of their weight. These results are based on analyses looking only at the participants who stayed on treatment, not all participants.
