Wegovy pill helps patients lose 6% of body weight in 3 months

Field data set to be presented at the Obesity Week conference in Washington has revealed that patients who took daily Wegovy pills from Novo Nordisk lost an average of 6.2 percent of their body weight over three months.

The Wegovy tablets, launched in January, have helped Novo Nordisk regain some ground lost to Eli Lilly, as the Danish pharmaceutical company seeks to maintain its lead over its American rival in the race to develop oral obesity treatments.

Martin Holst Lange, chief scientific officer at Novo Nordisk, said in an interview that the field data was encouraging, as it generally mirrored results from Novo’s late-stage trial, which showed a 5.5 percent body weight loss over 12 weeks with the tablets.

The company said that study participants, who began taking the pills between January 5 and February 7, lost an average of 6.3 kilograms from a baseline weight of 103.0 kilograms.

About three-fifths of participants lost at least five percent of their weight, while roughly one in six lost at least ten percent.

The study included 5,872 adults on the Ro health platform, none of whom had previously taken weight-loss medication, and all continued taking the pills for the full three months.