In this articleAMGNFollow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTThe Amgen logo is displayed outside Amgen headquarters in Thousand Oaks, California, on May 17, 2023.Mario Tama | Getty ImagesAmgen on Tuesday said its experimental weight loss injection helped patients with obesity lose up to 20% of their weight on average after a year in a critical mid-stage trial, as the company races to join the booming obesity drug market. The drug, MariTide, also helped patients with obesity and Type 2 diabetes lose up to 17% of their weight after a year. The company said it did not observe a plateau in either group of patients, which indicates the potential for further weight loss beyond 52 weeks. MariTide was taken monthly or even less frequently in the trial — which could offer an advantage over the popular weekly injections on the market.But shares of Amgen fell roughly 7% in premarket trading Tuesday, as the results appear to be at the lower end of Wall Street’s lofty expectations for the drug. Ahead of the data, several analysts said they wanted MariTide to show weight loss of at least 20% in the phase two trial, with some hoping for up to 25%. Wall Street has been eagerly awaiting the trial results, which shed light on how Amgen’s drug may measure up to blockbuster weight loss injections from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly and a crowded field of treatments being developed by other drugmakers.Amgen only released data on the first of two year-long parts of the trial, which was designed to test different dose sizes, schedules and regimens of MariTide. The trial’s main goal was to measure the amount of weight loss, but it also examined how long participants could go between injections and still shed pounds.Roughly 11% of patients discontinued treatment because of any adverse side effects, while less than 8% stopped specifically due to gastrointestinal side effects.The company will use the results of the first part “to put the fine details” on the design of its late-stage study on the treatment, which is “already deep into planning,” Amgen Chief Scientific Officer Jay Bradner said in an interview earlier this month. Amgen has said MariTide could offer quicker weight loss, possibly better weight maintenance and fewer shots than weekly injections such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. That could boost Amgen’s odds of winning a slice of the weight loss drug market, which some analysts forecast could be worth $150 billion a year by the early 2030s.Late-stage studies on Wegovy showed that it led to 15% weight loss over 68 weeks, while Zepbound helped patients lose more than 22% of their weight over 72 weeks. MariTide brings a new approach to weight loss compared to the existing drugs on the market because it is a so-called peptide antibody conjugate, which refers to a monoclonal antibody linked to two peptides. The peptides activate receptors of a gut hormone called GLP-1, while the antibody blocks receptors of another hormone called GIP hormone. That’s unlike Eli Lilly’s obesity drug, Zepbound, which activates both GIP and GLP-1. Wegovy activates GLP-1 but does not target GIP, which may also affect how the body breaks down sugar and fat.Shares of Amgen have soared this year in anticipation of the mid-stage trial data. That rally lost steam in recent weeks as one analyst raised questions about MariTide’s potential side effects related to bone density. Amgen has said it has no concerns about MariTide’s bone density data.Trial design, dataThe first part of the phase two trial followed 592 patients, including 465 patients with obesity and 127 with both …
