Roche touts early trial success of second obesity drug candidate

By Ludwig Burger and Paolo Laudani

(Reuters) -Roche said on Wednesday a second drug candidate from its purchase of Carmot Therapeutics yielded positive results in an early-stage trial, as the Swiss drugmaker asserted itself as a late contender in the race to develop obesity drugs.

Roche's experimental once-daily pill CT-996 resulted in a placebo-adjusted average weight loss of 6.1% within four weeks in obese patients without diabetes in a Phase I trial, Roche said in a statement.

The stock gained 6.1% at 1025 GMT to a one-year high, a similar market reaction to positive trial results from another Carmot drug that Roche reported in May.

Roche is among a growing number of would-be rivals to Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, whose weight-loss injections have been in feverish demand, with experts boosting their sales forecasts for such treatments to as much as $150 billion by the early 2030s.

Roche's experimental pill, which could appeal to patients averse to injections, was well tolerated with mostly mild or moderate gastrointestinal side effects similar to those seen in other weight-loss drugs, according to the statement.

Roche, however, faces a crowded and fast-advancing field in the quest to offer pills to replace weekly shots without compromising on weight loss.

Structure Therapeutics last month reported 6.2% average placebo-adjusted weight loss after 12 weeks from its pill in a Phase II trial.

Lilly's oral drug candidate orforglipron had shown weight loss of about 6% to 7% in the same period.

Pfizer last week mapped out trial plans for a reworked once-a-day pill, while Viking Therapeutics in March reported placebo-adjusted weight loss of 3.3% after four weeks for its experimental pill.

J.P. Morgan analysts said Roche's data looked competitive but the comparison was fraught with uncertainty.

Manu Chakravarthy, who heads metabolic drug development at Roche, said the race for easy-to-produce small-molecule chemical compounds against obesity was wide open.

Any unintended effects of the drug class were more difficult to predict than for the peptides in recently established obesity drugs, the executive said.

"Having worked with many small molecules for most of my life, I can say it's never over until it's over. It's a very different beast from an injectable formulation," Chakravarthy said.

Roche will now focus on advancing CT-996 to the second of three phases of testing on humans next year, he said.

Another drug candidate known as CT-388 from Roche's Carmot takeover, a self-administered once-weekly injection like Novo and Lilly's leading products, succeeded in a Phase I trial in May.

Roche in December agreed to take over Carmot for $2.7 billion upfront, joining other companies seeking to challenge the dominant makers of weight-loss drugs Novo and Lilly.

(Reporting by Paolo Laudani, Editing by Bernadette Baum, Louise Heavens and Arun Koyyur)