Roche Holding AG shares jumped after its experimental weight loss pill showed meaningful weight reduction in an early-stage study among obesity patients, setting up the Swiss drugmaker as a challenger in the field. 

Patients who took the oral medication, CT-996, once a day for four weeks lost on average more than 7% of their starting weight, compared with a little over 1% weight loss in patients who received a placebo, the Swiss drugmaker said in a statement on Wednesday. 

Roche rose as much as 7.4% in early trading, the most since March 2020. The stock is up about 12% since the start of the year. Shares in Novo Nordisk A/S, the maker of hit obesity drug Wegovy, fell as much as 5.2% in Copenhagen. 

In search of a turnaround after a series of trial failures in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, Roche has thrown itself into the hottest field in pharmaceuticals - obesity drugs. An oral medicine is one of the as-yet-untapped areas in a weight-loss market that Goldman Sachs estimates may reach US$130 billion annually by the end of the decade.

Headline results for the Roche pill “suggest a competitive profile”, Jefferies analysts wrote in a report, saying they await further details of any side effects among the study’s 25 participants with obesity. Roche said that based on the current results, the pill will move into the next stage of drug development.  

Pfizer Inc, Eli Lilly & Co and AstraZeneca plc are among the other drugmakers also working on needle-free weight-loss alternatives. Pills may eventually make up about a third of the obesity drug market, according to Pfizer, which last week said it is moving forward with its own pill. 

Roche’s experimental capsule, being developed to treat both Type 2 diabetes and obesity, was found to be well tolerated in the study, comparable with similar GLP-1 drugs, Roche said. Crucially, the pill could potentially be taken any time during the day - not only on an empty stomach - which could make it a convenient option for long-term maintenance treatment after patients have already lost weight using injected drugs, the company said. 

Roche acquired the drug candidate among others when it bought Carmot Therapeutics Inc for as much as US$3.1 billion in January. The deal opened “a whole new vista”, Roche said earlier this year, and it is looking for more experimental compounds to use in combination with Carmot’s candidates. 

  - Bloomberg