Dive Brief:
- AbbVie is joining the industry’s rush to develop new obesity medicines, announcing a deal this week with Denmark-based Gubra to license a drug that could compete with experimental therapies being developed by Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Zealand Pharma.
- Per deal terms, AbbVie will pay Gubra $350 million up front and offer up to $1.9 billion in additional payments tied to the achievement of development and sales milestones. AbbVie will assume responsibility for development and commercialization.
- Gubra is developing a type of drug called an amylin analog that regulates appetite and blood sugar levels. If successful, these drugs could be used as alternatives to or in combination with marketed drugs like Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound to increase weight loss or reduce side effects.
Dive Insight:
Lilly and Novo have a significant lead on the obesity field, as they market the only two blockbuster drugs proven in testing to result in double-digit percentage weight loss. But those GLP-1 drugs have drawbacks, including side effects like nausea and vomiting in many people who take the once-weekly shots. They also have high discontinuation rates due to those side effects as well as their costs.
Those shortcomings, along with the draw of a market forecast to exceed $100 billion annually by the 2030s, have energized obesity drug research and dealmaking. Even companies like AbbVie and Amgen that don’t have a long track record in metabolic drugs are getting involved.
AbbVie found an attractive deal with Gubra, which is developing an agent it calls GUB014295 or GUBamy. The experimental drug has completed a Phase 1 dosing trial in men considered lean or overweight by body-mass index. Trial volunteers who received the highest dose lost an average of 3% of their body weight over six weeks.
An additional dosing trial is underway, with results from various parts of that study due to be available throughout 2025.
At this stage of development, Gubra’s candidate is around a year and a half behind Zealand, which has an amylin-targeting drug in a phase 2 trial due to read out in 2026, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Prakhar Agrawal wrote in a note to clients.
Novo, meanwhile, already has phase 3 data on its amylin drug cagrilintide, which was assessed in a trial alone and as part of a combination with Wegovy called CagriSema. Lilly has an amylin drug in phase 2, and AstraZeneca and Metsera are developing similar agents.
While the Gubra trial results so far suggest the drug is active, Agrawal added that it’s “hard to know whether it’s differentiated in any way.”
However, Gubra developed its drug to be more stable than other amylin-targeting drugs, Agrawal wrote. Those drugs commonly undergo a chemical reaction called “fibrillation” that can reduce potency, raise the risk of side effects and affect quality.
