Retatrutide delivered 28.3% weight loss over 80 weeks in the Phase 3 TRIUMPH-1 trial, and Lilly wasn’t done. Saturday’s ADA Scientific Sessions presentation added the numbers regulators will actually argue about: 73% reduction in knee osteoarthritis pain and 60% drop in sleep apnea severity, cutting 36 apnea events per hour. That’s 70 pounds of weight loss and two comorbidity readouts from a single trial population.
In TRANSCEND-T2D-1, retatrutide cut A1C by up to 2 percentage points in patients with diabetes, with 16.8% weight loss at 40 weeks. Almost half of patients reached normal A1C.
The next day Lilly shifted to Foundayo, the oral GLP-1 that FDA cleared in April. ATTAIN program data showed perimenopause patients losing up to 30.4 pounds (14.4%) and postmenopausal women losing 28.2 pounds (14.1%) at week 72. Menopause-driven weight gain is famously hard to treat, and Foundayo’s any-time-of-day dosing gives it a convenience story Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy can’t match.
Lead TRIUMPH-1 investigator Ania Jastreboff of Yale put the retatrutide case plainly: obesity drives more than 200 downstream diseases, but medicine has treated them one condition at a time. That’s the conflict retatrutide is designed to break. A drug that simultaneously moves weight, glycemia, joint pain, and airway obstruction doesn’t fit the standard NDA box — and it won’t file like one either.
Lilly presents longer-term Mounjaro data tomorrow at ADA.
— Sarah Chen