Blockbuster weight loss and diabetes drugs may lower patients’ risk of developing some common types of cancer that are closely linked to obesity, new evidence suggests. Patients with Type 2 diabetes who were prescribed drugs known as glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, developed fewer obesity-related cancers than patients who were treated with insulin, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open. But the newer drugs didn’t perform better than metformin, an older diabetes drug with known cancer risk reduction properties.
The group of drugs the study looked at includes Novo Nordisk A/S’s Ozempic, a diabetes treatment. Since the study concluded, two drugs that work in similar ways were approved for weight loss, Novo’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound.
Novo’s American depositary receipts rose 2.2% at 11:40 a.m.
in New York on Friday. Eli Lilly’s shares gained 1.6%.
The study is based on electronic health records for more than 1.6 million patients with Type 2 diabetes for 15 years ending in November 2018. Since that was less than a year after Ozempic was introduced in the U.
S., most of the GLP-1 patients in the study would have been taking first-generation medicines, such as Novo’s Victoza, said Lindsey Wang, a rising second-year student in the BS-MD program at Case Western Reserve University, who did the data analysis. Still, the study is the latest evidence to suggest that widely popular diabetes and weight-loss shots may have a role in cancer .
