By Josh Nathan-Kazis
The pharmaceutical companies set to dominate the multi-billion dollar market for new obesity medicines could have a serious challenger from the small biotech Structure Therapeutics if new data on its obesity pill holds up in larger trials.
Structure (ticker: GPCR) said early Friday that patients lost 5.4% of their body weight at the highest dose tested, compared to 0.5% body weight reductions in the placebo group. The small, brief Phase 1b trial included 24 healthy overweight or obese individuals who received four weeks of the drug or a placebo.
Data on another, larger ongoing trial of the same drug will be delayed until early next year, the company said, after a data collection error. Patients in that trial, a Phase 2a study, will receive twelve weeks of treatment.
The first wave of new GLP-1 obesity medicines from Eli Lilly (ticker: LLY) and Novo Nordisk $(NVO)$ are expensive injections, like Novo's Wegovy. Analysts say that the arrival of cheaper, more convenient pill versions of the GLP-1s could mean much broader access for patients, and eventually a larger market.
Lilly is developing an obesity pill called orforglipron, while Pfizer $(PFE)$ is testing a competitor called danuglipron. This very early study from Structure suggests that its pill, called GSBR-1290, could be competitive with the offerings from the big pharma companies, though data from the larger and longer delayed trial could bring more clarity next year.
"GPCR is still trailing LLY and NOVO in this category by a couple years but looks to be closing the gap a bit in terms of its oral therapy," Mizuho healthcare trading desk strategist Jared Holz wrote in an email to investors on Friday. The Structure drug, Holz wrote, "could get to the market possibly just a year or two behind the mega-cap players."
GSBR-1290 is, like the medicines from Lilly, Novo, and Pfizer, a GLP-1 receptor agonist. The drugs mimic natural hormones that have effects on the body's insulin release, its blood sugar levels, and feelings of fullness after eating, among other things.
In a note on Friday morning, Leerink Partners analyst David Risinger wrote that an early-stage Phase 1a trial of Lilly's experimental orforglipron showed a placebo-adjusted weight loss of just 3.6%, compared to GSBR-1290's 4.9%, at the highest dose. Later, in a 36-week-long Phase 2 trial, patients on Lilly's orforglipron lost 14.7% of their body weight.
Pfizer's danuglipron, for its part, will need to be administered twice daily, which has left investors pessimistic about its commercial potential. Risinger wrote that GSBR-1290 is "clearly a once-daily drug in our view." That could give it a leg-up over danuglipron.
Structure shares were up more than 36% in Friday morning trading, after climbing as much as 100% during the premarket hours. Also on Friday morning, the company announced a private placement equity financing of $300 million, which it said would allow it to continue financing its operations through the end of 2026.
The data from early trial also suggests that the drug will be tolerable for patients, a key concern for this class of drugs, which has the tendency to cause side effects like nausea and vomiting. Structure said that no participants in the small study stopped using the drug due to adverse events. Among the six patients who received the drug at the highest dose level, half reported mild adverse events related to the treatment and half reported moderate adverse events.
Structure is also running a Phase 2a trial of GSBR-1290. The company on Friday disclosed a data collection error related to one portion of that trail and said that some data from the trial will not come until the first half of 2024. Data from another part of the trial will come in the second half of the fourth quarter of 2023.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 29, 2023 11:19 ET (15:19 GMT)
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