Pfizer missed its first chance at following Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly into the fast-growing market for GLP-1 obesity drugs. CEO Albert Bourla is advising investors not to count it out too quickly the second time.
On Tuesday, as the company reported second quarter earnings, Bourla told analysts on a conference call he thinks Pfizer is still in good position to deliver an oral GLP-1 weight loss drug — the goal of many would-be rivals to Novo and Lilly.
The company’s recent advancement of its experimental pill, called danuglipron, came after several setbacks, including Pfizer’s decision to scrap another clinical-stage compound over safety concerns. Danuglipron’s development was also slowed by early data that indicated a high rate of side effects.
Pfizer claims to be back on track. Earlier this month it said it identified a once-daily formulation that, in studies testing how danuligpron interacts with the body, appeared to have a better profile in healthy volunteers.
Despite the earlier slowdowns, Bourla thinks Pfizer’s pill trails only Eli Lilly’s orforglipron as an oral drug acting on the gastrointestinal hormone GLP-1. Currently, Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound, both injectable medicines, are the dominant obesity treatment options.
The data Pfizer has seen so far, which come from 1,400 patients, is "very competitive, both on durability and efficacy with whatever we have seen from others in the oral space," Bourla said during the earnings call. "With everything we know we are the only one who has [phase] 2b data on an oral GLP-1 after, of course, Lilly.”
If danuglipron is successful in testing, Pfizer would aim to break into a market that some analysts estimate could reach annual sales of $100 billion a year by the 2030s. Wegovy earned sales of $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024 and Zepbound $517 million.
However, both are now well-established, having also shown that they can prevent health complications linked to obesity like cardiovascular disease and sleep apnea. This additional data is seen as essential to persuading insurers to cover the drugs for more people.
Lilly’s orforglipron entered phase 3 trials already, putting it well ahead of danuglipron. Novo has an oral GLP-1 pill, but it is a peptide drug that requires up to 50 milligrams daily of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, compared with up to 2.4 milligrams a week when taken as a shot. Novo is also advancing a drug called amycretin that’s earlier in testing.
Both Novo and Lilly have struggled to manufacture enough of their peptide drugs to keep up with demand, prompting both companies to commit billions of dollars to expand manufacturing capacity. The shortages also sparked intense interest in small molecule, chemical drugs targeting GLP-1 that are easier to manufacture, like orforglipron and danuglipron.
Roche is close behind with an oral GLP-1 drug in phase 1 testing, part of a suite of therapies the Swiss pharmaceutical giant gained via a $2.7 billion acquisition of Carmot Therapeutics.
