Healthy returns: Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical corporations present encouraging data on weight-loss drugs

Good morning! Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and other pharmaceutical corporations presented encouraging data on weight-loss and diabetes drugs last week.

Companies presented their results on the American Diabetes Association conference annual meeting The world's largest scientific conference specializing in diabetes research, prevention and treatment takes place in Orlando, Florida.

The drug developments come against the backdrop of growing investor interest within the treatment of metabolic diseases and particularly in a much-discussed class of medicine called GLP-1

But drug corporations have presented treatments that use different approaches than traditional GLP-1 drugs, similar to Novo Nordisk's popular weight-loss injectable Wegovy and its diabetes counterpart Ozempic. The two drugs mimic a hormone produced within the gut that suppresses an individual's appetite.

Companies are also not focusing their trials solely on weight reduction. Some pharmaceutical corporations are studying whether their drugs could be used to treat other diseases, while others are studying whether a drug can preserve patients' muscle mass while promoting weight reduction.

Here are a few of the highlights of the conference:

• Eli Lilly has released additional data from two late-stage clinical trials showing that its weight-loss injection Zepbound helped resolve a typical sleep problem called obstructive sleep apnea in nearly half of patients. The company said Zepbound could receive expanded U.S. approval for that use as early as the top of the 12 months.
• Novo Nordisk presented results from key clinical trials of semaglutide, the energetic ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic, in diabetes, obesity and chronic kidney disease. These include full results from a late-stage study of Ozempic in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease. The weekly injection significantly reduced the danger of kidney disease progression and death from kidney or cardiovascular complications in patients. New Data also showed that these advantages are consistent no matter whether patients are also treated with a category of diabetes drugs called sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors. Novo Nordisk expects U.S. regulators to make a choice on expanded approval for this use in January 2025.
• Zealand Pharma presented positive results from an early-stage clinical trial of its experimental weekly injection petrelintide, which targets the amylin hormone. The drug resulted in 8.6% weight reduction after 16 weeks, in comparison with 1.7% in patients taking a placebo. The Danish company sees the drug as an alternative choice to GLP-1 for weight reduction.
• Altimmun Approved complete data from a mid-stage clinical trial of its experimental obesity drug pemvidutide. The treatment preserved muscle mass while promoting weight reduction in adults with obesity, with a lot of the reduction coming from fat. A subgroup evaluation of fifty patients found that only 21.9% of their weight reduction was as a consequence of muscle mass.
• Viking Therapeutics reveals preclinical Data on a “series” of experimental drugs called dual amylin and calcitonin receptor agonists, or DACRAs. The results show that the corporate's DACRAs reduced the quantity of food rats ate in the primary three days after a single dose. Three days after the dose, the rats experienced as much as an 8% lower rate of body weight gain than the rats given Novo Nordisk's experimental weight-loss drug CagriSema.
• Gilead demonstrated Data from a preclinical study of its experimental oral GLP-1 called GS-4571. The trial found that the treatment improved glucose tolerance in mice and led to a weight reduction of 5 to six percent inside five days, in accordance with a Sunday note from Jefferies analysts. The note, citing a poster on the conference, added that obese monkeys lost 8 percent of their weight after 30 days.

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oracle on Monday expanded access to its artificial intelligence-based tool called Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant, which is designed to avoid wasting doctors time by automating a few of their documentation.

Administrative tasks like paperwork are sometimes a burden for healthcare staff. According to a survey conducted by Athenahealth in February, nearly 65% ​​of physicians consider they’re a number one explanation for burnout. Doctors spend a mean of 15 hours per week outside of their normal work hours managing the workload, the survey found.

For example, Dr. Ryan McFarland, a primary care physician at Hudson Physicians in Wisconsin, sees a mean of 25 patients a day. After each appointment, he must prepare a chart detailing what happened and what must be followed up. He says meaning “several hours” of documentation per day.

“This is just documentation, not responding to lab results, patient questions or messages,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “It can be very tedious to take notes and documentation on top of the actual patient care.”

Oracle said Oracle's Clinical Digital Assistant may help reduce this administrative burden. Doctors can access the tool through an app on their phone and record their visits with patients on the touch of a button. Once they stop recording, Oracle's AI robotically creates a clinical note based on the appointment, allowing doctors You not have to put in writing it yourself.

Only authorized representatives of the healthcare organizations have access to the records, Oracle said.

The assistant works with Oracle's electronic medical record, so doctors can even verbally ask it to drag up details about a patient's medical history, similar to the most recent blood test results, the corporate said. In other words, doctors need to spend less time looking through records for the relevant information they need.

Oracle has tested the tool with 13 healthcare organizations, including Hudson Physicians. Oracle said its assistant saved doctors a mean of 4 and a half minutes per patient, in addition to 20 to 40 percent of their day by day documentation time. As of Monday, the tool is mostly available in outpatient clinics or clinics that usually are not affiliated with hospitals.

“This is going to be a practice requirement in our business going forward,” McFarland said. “The accuracy of the notes is much better, you notice things you would otherwise have forgotten to document. It saves a lot of time.”

McFarland said he has worked with other dictation tools up to now, however the software continuously made errors and had problems with rapid speech. He has also worked with human scribes who’re more accurate, but he said they could be time-consuming to coach and difficult to employ. Oracle's assistant performs the identical as a human scribe, McFarland said.

“I think from a grade generation standpoint, it's 90 to 100 percent where it needs to be,” he said.

McFarland said the tool handles complex medical terminology well and might even understand abbreviations. He said there continues to be room for improvement in some specialty-specific treatments, in addition to other features, similar to how the assistant may help with ordering imaging procedures and sending referrals and reminders to return to the clinic.

Some doctors at Hudson Physicians care more concerning the sort of their notes than others, so some doctors still spend time editing, in accordance with McFarland. Even so, the clinic has seen a 100% adoption rate for Oracle's assistant, something McFarland says it has never seen before.

“It has changed everything for us and we will continue to use it,” he said.

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