New-gen drug for weight loss and diabetes helps shed 28% body weight: Side effects

Multinational pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, renowned for making type 2 diabetes drugs like Mounjaro and antidepressant Prozac, said that it's experimenting with an obesity drug that helps patients lose 28% weight. The trial of the medication has been ongoing for over a year and a half, and the company plans to launch the medication next year. The drug, named retatrutide, can apparently help patients at various stages of their obesity journey and in treating type 2 diabetes. On its website, Eli Lilly says those who took retatrutide had improvements in cardiovascular risk factors, waist circumference, non-HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, systolic blood pressure and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. 

Side effects
According to Reuters, the medicine's earlier trial data showed that patients experienced dysesthesia, a rare abnormal skin sensation. The latest data appeared to ease some of those worries, with fewer patients reporting dysesthesia. In the late-stage trial in patients with obesity, but not diabetes, those receiving the highest 12 milligrams of retatrutide lost an average of 28.3% of their weight over 80 weeks, while more than 45% of participants lost at least 30%, a level of efficacy the company said rivals bariatric surgery."That's really a threshold that's historically been associated with bariatric surgery," Kenneth Custer, Eli Lilly's president of cardiometabolic health, said in an interview.

Lilly's currently approved injection, Zepbound, and Novo Nordisk's Wegovy have shown weight loss of roughly 15% to 20% in different trials, while Lilly's oral obesity pill candidate has delivered about 11% weight loss. Lilly's triple-agonist retatrutide is not yet FDA-approved for prescription use and is in the late stages of clinical trials.  'Diabetes' has more than 2K search results on Google Trends in the past 22 hours. 
(With inputs from Reuters)