All of a sudden, Ozempic is everywhere. The weight-loss drug that it contains, semaglutide, is a potent treatment for obesity, and Hollywood and TikTok celebrities have turned it into a sensation. In just a few months, the medication has been branded as “revolutionary” and “game-changing,” with the power to permanently alter society’s conceptions of fatness and thinness. Certainly, a drug like semaglutide could be all of those things: Never in the history of medicine has one so safely led to such dramatic weight loss in so many people.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As weight-loss medications go, Ozempic is far from perfect. Though the drug has profound impacts, it requires weekly injections, a tolerance for uncomfortable side effects, and the stamina—not to mention the budget—for long-term treatment. (Ozempic has somehow become a catchall term for semaglutide but technically that product has gotten FDA sign-off only as a diabetes medication. A larger dose of semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy, has been approved for weight loss.)
Made by the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, semaglutide dominates the U.S. weight-loss market right now, but its reign might be short-lived. The colossal demand for these drugs has spurred a competition in the pharmaceutical industry to develop even more potent and powerful medications. The first of them could become available as soon as this summer. For all its hype, semaglutide is the stepping stone and not the final destination of a new class of obesity drugs. Just how good they get, and how quickly, will go a long way in determining whether this pharmaceutical revolution actually meets its full promise.
In a sense, semaglutide hardly represents a major step forward in science. Diet drugs are nothing new, and even the category of pharmaceuticals that these new products belong to, called “GLP-1 agonists,” has been around for several years. These drugs mimic the hormone GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide one) and bind to…
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