Is it the begining of the end for Weight loss injections?

[BeginingoftheendforWLI]

Just watched a report on BBC news, they did an item on a woman who had type 2 diabetes and was prescribed Mounjaro, doctors were impressed she managed to come off insulin within a month. She had some weightloss and now goes to the gym regularly.

Her doctor admitted that there was widespread concern in the medical field that people who were buying it privately for cosmetic reasons not for medical reasons could face some consequences in the future such as muscle growth and bone degeneration and lack of nutrition - they simply don't have this data at present.

Feel like this is going to be big news in the foreseeable future.

Yeah, either take it or don’t . It’s not a badge of honour either way. If the NHS stop funding it after a period of time, then pay or come off it. 🙄

@Boomer55hardly anyone gets WLI on the NHS. The almost entire majority of the millions taking them are already paying for them privately.

On NYE I was chatting with the CEO of a UK based drugs company. He predicted that when the patent expires on the drugs in 7 years (I think?) the average monthly cost to buy it will be approx. £25 - £35 a month. So very affordable to many, many more people.

Blimey

I think the patents will be renewed. Wishful thinking.

Wegovy goes off patent in the UK in 2028, Mounjaro in 2032.

For those of us who don't know how this sort of thing works, can organisations just renew medical patents? Found this but not sure if it would be the right procedure.

https://www.gov.uk/renew-patent

IF you are granted a patent, you can renew it annually for 20 years, the rules are slightly different for drugs, as there will be regulatory considerations after the patent has been granted. A patent has to be for a novel product /process or use, so the information can not have already been published.

They will renew for a new purpose..

But you don't NEED a lot of calories. Most people just eat them anyway. Watched 'The 70's diet' only 2 parts but it clearly shows how it all went so wrong then. Portions now are huge in comparison and it's become normalised now.
Medicine shouldn't be there to fix habits we develop and could prevent but it would require a giant societal shake up and companies not allowed to sell us addictive poisons under the guise of food.

The last couple of posts on this thread are fun Discussion of cigarettes being sold as an appetite suppressant and prescription speed in the 70s!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5472274-if-you-are-on-weight-loss-injections-what-do-you-make-of-this-article?page=12&reply=149770139

I'd like to hope the latter was fairly unusual. But not far off half the adult population was smoking at the time so that definitely wasn't. If we want to talk about why things are different now to how they were 50 years ago, millions being on a different appetite suppressant drug has to be relevant.

Nothing wrong with trying to reform the food industry, but we need to do this in the full knowledge that there has never been a time when we all had enough to eat, weren't smoking like chimneys and didn't have a weight gain problem. People who think that's possible are guessing. All societies with enough money mean people start piling it on eventually.

Not very unusual at all! At its height in 1979, 30 million benzodiazepine prescriptions were written annually. By 1976, one in 20 prescriptions in Britain was for Valium. https://www.historyhit.com/mothers-little-helper-the-history-of-valium/ . In 1969, 1,700,000 prescriptions for amphetamines were made in England and Wales and that was a reduction on previous levels! https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1971-04-08/debates/00e3e71b-79fb-466a-9c58-4c08ffb7566e/Amphetamines

Wow, no wonder they were all so thin then! Couple of million people on WLIs in 2025 looks positively tame by comparison.

I know turns out when you're high as a kite so you can ignore your emotions and smoke like a chimney you probably don't want a lot of food. But everyone was slim and healthy before we all discovered chips and the sofa.

I've always been staggered by those stats too @DarkForces. Read once that in the 1950s, the NHS issued more prescriptions for barbiturates than penicillin! It's so dangerous, I don't think it would be given now unless in very extreme circumstances, but back then it was a way of calming and shutting up women who had 'trouble with their nerves' (I'm guessing the majority were just suffering menopause symptoms and terrible marriages).

How much do you think these tablets will cost? In comparison to MJ?

They will definitely be less. It's a lot cheaper to produce tablets than injectable liquid. The smaller volume they take up, the lack of refrigeration required, easier storage, means that once production ramps up, they will be an awful lot cheaper.

As someone who works in pharma, we are looking to develop the most effective treatments possible, and a cure would be the holy grail. This isn’t altruism - effective treatments can charge more and are more likely to get approval. If someone had a cure for weight management you can bet they would bring it to market and charge a premium,

Thank you.
I really hope you're right.
Although I'm worried that the pharmaceutical companies will still market them at an over inflated price purely because of what they are.
I've never felt so well in myself as I have done since using a GLP1. It's done so much more for me than the weight loss and it has resolved a list of medical problems. I want to use it forever, but with the recent price hike of MJ, this will be my last month of using it sadly due to the cost.
So I hope you're right about the tablets.
When are they coming?

Sometime this year. One poster earlier said they have already been prescribed them

I think there's some confusion around the tablet form of semaglutide. There has been a tablet form around for a while in the UK called Rybelsus. It's at a lower dose than the new Wegovy tablet that hasn't been approved yet, but that's the only difference. Rybelsus is not approved in the UK for weight loss, only for T2 diabetes control. Some pharmacies and doctors will prescribe Rybelsus "off label" for weight loss, but it isn't very common and would be on a case by case basis where there would have to be a medical reason for not using the Wegovy injections instead.

The new Wegovy tablet has just been submitted for approval in the UK (www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/uks-pharma-regulator-could-issue-decision-novos-wegovy-pill-by-year-end-2026-01-05/) . It has just been approved in the US by the FDA, and has been submitted to the EU panel for approval. It might take around 3 to 6 months to be approved in the UK. Then it would take another 1-2 months for pharmacies to be able to order it and get it in stock. So realistically you're looking at mid-2026 at the earliest, probably later in 2026 or even into 2027.

The prices for the new Wegovy tablets in the US have been announced as $149 per month for the lower doses, and $299 for the higher doses. I think the pricing in the UK will be interesting, as if Novo Nordisk make the tablets too much cheaper than the injections then they risk wiping out their own sales of those. They are essentially competing against themselves.

They are essentially competing against themselves.

@SilenceInside they are, but given this is very early days in terms of the markets for this class of weight loss drugs, they’ve also got enormous potential to grow the market (i.e. reach lots more people) by pitching different products at different prices. Especially a product that almost sells itself in terms of patient demand. You need to go back to the launch of Viagra to see something similar in tens of impact.

Loosing weight quickly is bad, because if you loose it too fast your body burns fat for energy but also looses muscle tone and your body feels fatigued.
when you stop using the injections and regain the weight, you regain the fat but not the muscle…. So then your body has a higher percentage of fat than before and lower metabolic rate than before before muscle burns fat!
Also the way in which these injections work
is to slow down digestion, which in turn slows down the absorption of glucose into the blood (which is the diabetes side
of things) it also works by reducing the resistance the body has to insulin.. the side effect is feeling full or feeling sick if you over eat as the undigested food seeds festering in your bowel/stomach…. It is reasonably well known in the medical field that these injections carry a long list of health risks BUT when used short term to reduce someone’s insulin resistance and put their type 2 diabetes into remission, the risks type 2 diabetes carries long term out weigh the risks of the injections short term!
Type 2 diabetes carries risks and increases your chances of developing so many illnesses due to the strain on the whole body and nervous system that comes with having high/low blood glucose… so it is deemed ‘worth the risk’ putting diabetic people in these injections if they lower these long term risks.
The same could be said if a patient is morbidly obese I guess, however it’s a short term fix and not really worth the increased health risks of being on these injections long term.
The issue comes when people who are only a bit overweight are lying on line to get these injections to loose and keep off weight, hugely increasing their risks of muscle mass loss, bowel cancers, stomach cancers (from the rotting food sitting around in their stomach or bowels longer than it should) … also risk of bowels becoming lazy/giving up .. I believe it is predicted that lots of these people abusing these injections and not being monitored by a GP ay end up with stoma bags later down the line …
Its fairly obvious really that slowing digestion and having all that rotting food sat in acid in your stomach and intestines for longer than it naturally should be is bad bad news!!

I’d be really interested to read the research into delayed gastric emptying causing stomach cancers please - I’ve had a quick google but nothing has shown up.

@T1Dmama honestly where do you get all this invented stuff from? What evidence do you have of a connection to stomach or bowel cancer? Food does not sit rotting in your digestive system, that’s a total nonsense.

I’m also interested in how you come to a different conclusion from the MHRA in the UK who carefully analysed all the data and came to the conclusion that the risks are outweighed by the benefits for anyone who is obese. Not just morbidly obese, but obese or even overweight with weight related health issues. You seem to think they are wrong but you’ve not explained your reasoning.