By Maggie Fick
LONDON (Reuters) – AstraZeneca said on Monday its experimental weight-loss pill, licensed from China’s Eccogene, was safe and tolerable in an early-stage trial, with side effects consistent with the GLP-1 drug class.
The Phase I trial – which had 72 participants – was designed to assess the safety and tolerability of the pill, as is common in the earliest stage of clinical trials. People enrolled in the trial were either healthy, non-obese volunteers or people with type 2 diabetes.
The results from the trial gave AstraZeneca confidence to progress the drug into Phase II clinical trials, Sharon Barr, the company’s executive vice president of biopharmaceuticals R&D, told a media briefing. She spoke before the data was presented at the ObesityWeek conference in San Antonio, Texas.
One of those trials will focus on reduction in body weight on average in obese and overweight participants and it is expected to be completed by the end of 2025, Barr said.
When AstraZeneca announced it had licensed the experimental, once-daily obesity pill from Eccogene a year ago for up to $2 billion, it said it believed the treatment could cause fewer side effects than current injectable treatments such Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy.
“We saw a dose-dependent increase in nausea and vomiting consistent with molecules in this class,” Barr said in the briefing, referring to the drug class of GLP-1 receptor agonists, which slow digestion and reduce hunger. Zepbound and Wegovy are both from this class.
There were no serious adverse events reported from either trial, she said.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick; Editing by Jan Harvey and Susan Fenton)
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