A Decade of Data Under the Belt

Your company’s anti-obesity medication, Contrave, has been around for over 10 years—long before this current weight loss drug craze. Can you tell me about it?

Contrave was an idea that was sparked, you know, early in the 2000s, that we could actually put two different molecules, two different active ingredients together. For the purpose of really offsetting the reasons a patient at person craves food, and the worst reasons a person gets hungry unnecessarily. And so, you know, Contrave works both on the mesolimbic system, which is kind of the brain's reward system for different things. So, when people eat food and fuel a high as a result, Contrave works to offset that and on the hedonic system whereby country works on the overall hunger suppression. That is important for patients suffering from obesity.

A big holdout for patients is not knowing the ‘What ifs’ of long-term effects of some of these therapies. With 10 years in the space, your company actually has that long-term data to show. So, what has patient success and outcome looked like after a decade?

I think the first thing is that all medications have side effects. And we're in the business of making sure that all patients and physicians understand that all medications have side effects and, and we operate under what I think is the greatest regulatory body for food and medicine in the world, and that's the FDA. We have very detailed package labels, we have very detailed patient inserts and information to make sure people are comfortable. That said, you know, Contrave has been around for 10 years, and the individual molecules have been available for more than 25 years each, right. And so these active ingredients and Contrave as a combined tablet that are incredibly well studied. And we know the side effects in the package label really reflects that. Contrave is the number one prescribed oral anti-obesity medication in the United States. We are in 48 countries now including the US. And so, the product is an incredibly wide spectrum of use or across the globe. And we now have a pharmaceutical database of patients that have you know, makes up probably 640 or 650,000 patient years of experience from safety. So, we know a lot about this product and patients.

We want to physician identifies the appropriate patient they can take it take it safely and the side effects are known, or they can come off the medication very quickly if they if they do experience something that said there's a lot of new medications on the marketplace, right. So, these GLP-1s that have come out are very exciting. And they are critical to the overall treatment paradigm of getting obesity under control in the United States and around the globe. We've been waiting a long time for these products. And it's great that very large companies like Lilly have brought these products to market because Eli Lilly, a great American Pharmaceutical company, comes to market, they come to market not with just a product but all of the services and support around the disease state for the patients and their families and the health care provider. So, it's been very beneficial. But GLP-1s have been around since the early 2000s, there was a very low dose GLP-1 used for type two diabetes, called by Ada in 2004 2005. And it's still on the market today. The difference now is that they found ways to really increase the dose of these GLP-1s to be your target weight instead of just targeting type two type two diabetes and a once you control.