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Recently, there’s a breakthrough in obesity treatment with medication. The medications that have been available over the years for obesity have all had either difficulty in terms of being controlled substances, or drugs like fen-phen that cause damage to the heart valves. So patients have become very reluctant to take medicines for weight loss because of the predecessors. But just recently in June of 2021, Wegovy was launched. WEGOVY. And Wegovy is essentially the same drug as ozempic, and ozempic, as you may have seen through commercials, is semiglutide, which has got three different names. Semiglutide has rybelsus, which is an oral medication for diabetes, ozempic, which is a weekly injection for patients with diabetes, and then semiglutide was studied because patients that took rybelsus and ozempic for diabetes had increased weight loss. And they found out that the same protein, GLPRA, is actually the same protein involved in satiety.
And they studied it for weight loss in all patients, including non-diabetics. And they saw significant weight loss. And in June, the FDA allowed it to be approved as a weight loss medication as a weekly injection at a higher dose than what we give to diabetics. So this is indeed a breakthrough for managing weight loss in patients who are morbidly obese. And I think other medicines obviously had to come in the marketplace and then be tested, and then we find all the potential harms. The lucky thing about the Wegovy approach is that Wegovy has already been used as an oral agent, rybelsus, and as a injection, ozempic, in diabetics for several years, and we’ve seen that there isn’t any untoward side effects that one would face. So I think it is relatively safer for patients with morbid obesity to try to pursue weight loss.
