New GLP-1 Competition, FDA Approval, and Genomic Atlases Advance Drug Development

At the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk showcased new GLP-1 drugs, with Novo Nordisk's Wegovy pill achieving over 3 million prescriptions within five months of launch, indicating the potential of oral medications to attract more patients to weight-loss treatments. Structure Therapeutics and AstraZeneca also shared mid-stage data on their respective GLP-1 pills, which, if successful in Phase 3 trials, are expected to hit the market by 2029.

Pfizer's drug, acquired through its $10 billion purchase of Metsera, shows potential for monthly injections, while Amgen is testing a drug that could be administered quarterly, significantly improving patient adherence and reducing the burden of weekly injections. Zealand Pharma's petrelintide drug demonstrated an average weight loss of nearly 11% in mid-stage trials, which, while less effective than existing medications, had fewer side effects.

In oncology, TRUQAP has been approved by the US FDA as the first targeted treatment for PTEN-deficient metastatic androgen pathway modulation-naïve or sensitive prostate cancer. The CAPItello-281 trial demonstrated that the combination of TRUQAP and abiraterone reduced the risk of radiographic disease progression or death by 19%, significantly increasing the median radiographic progression-free survival to 33.2 months. Approximately 200,000 patients globally are diagnosed with PTEN-deficient metastatic prostate cancer each year, with about 35,000 in the US. In the trial, 67% of patients experienced grade 3 or higher adverse events, with the most common being rash (12.3%) and hyperglycemia (10.3%).

Beyond individual drug developments, large-scale genomic initiatives are being launched to expand the biological data underlying therapeutic discovery. A global atlas of gut bacteria from babies across 48 countries, outlined in the journal Cell, comprises 4,098 genomes from the key Bifidobacterium infant gut microbe species B. longum and B. infantis. The catalog is well over 10 times larger than similar previous studies and increases representation from low-and-middle income countries 12- to 17-fold.

The microbiome atlas reveals B. infantis bacteria as a "missing microbe" — rarely seen among infants from high-income countries such as Western Europe and North America but dominating early-life microbiota from low-and-middle income countries in Africa and South Asia. The researchers suggest this could be due to lifestyle changes associated with industrialization, including earlier weaning, formula use, and antibiotic exposure. The findings also confirm B. longum and B. infantis as distinct species with different functions. The atlas suggests currently available commercial probiotics may be poorly designed, as these strains had often partially lost the diverse metabolic loci that made regional strains better adapted to local populations.

In a separate effort to expand genetic data for drug discovery, Basecamp Research has introduced the Trillion Gene Atlas, a scientific initiative designed to dramatically expand the genetic data available for training artificial intelligence models in therapeutic development. By forging a global network of biodiversity partners across dozens of countries, the project aims to collect genomic data from over 100 million species and effectively increase the known evolutionary genetic diversity by a factor of 100. The initiative utilizes Ultima Genomics' high-throughput sequencing systems, PacBio's long-read technology, and NVIDIA's accelerated computing infrastructure to process quadrillions of DNA base pairs.