LONDON/COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Novo Nordisk on Wednesday said its new trial of its next-generation obesity drug candidate CagriSema will look at dose escalation and trial length to further show the drug’s potential, after data in December disappointed the market.
CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen told journalists on a media call that the company is confident in the drug’s biology and encouraged by what it has seen in the data.
The company on Dec. 20 revealed disappointing results in a late-stage trial for its experimental next-generation obesity drug CagriSema, sending its shares down as much as 27% on the day in one of the biggest one-day wipeouts for a European company.
The drug is crucial to its search for a successor to Wegovy that is more powerful than Eli Lilly’s rival Zepbound, also known as Mounjaro.
But Jorgensen did not give an explanation for a key question puzzling the market from the data: only 57.3% of patients in that trial reached the highest dose of the medicine. This made investors wonder if it was because patients suffered harsh side effects or because they achieved good weight loss on lower doses.
“It’s clear when you work with a potent biology like CagriSema, you see people losing weight significantly, and some of those will hit the weight they attempted to reach and the BMI they are targeting.”
Jorgensen said the company does not see a problem related to side-effects with the experimental drug.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick and Stine Jacobsen, Editing by Louise Heavens)
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