Global sales of new so-called miracle drugs to counter obesity could expand from $10 billion to $100 billion by 2030, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs.
The treatments, which include Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Eli Lilly's Zepbound, work by regulating appetites, including by slowing the stomach-emptying process and signalling to the brain that there is food in the gut.
Appetite for the drugs could grow beyond those projections, particularly if the health insurance industry develops a taste for including them in policies.
According to Goldman Sachs, "the drugs are expensive, insurance coverage is limited, and not everyone with obesity can or wants to take them."
At the same time, the treatments, which can cost around $15,000 a year per person in the US, will likely be of use "for only a fraction of the 1 billion people globally who have obesity," according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who contributed to the Goldman Sachs report.
The need for the drugs has grown in the wake of widening waistlines worldwide, with the number of people classed as obese doubling to almost 900 million worldwide between 1990 and 2022, according to national data gathered by the World Health Organization. Around 2.5 billion of the world’s adults are overweight.
While the problem was in the past confined to wealthy or Western nations, increasing wealth and rising numbers of people working in sedentary or office settings elsewhere, particularly in Asia, has added to the number. With this there has been a rise in those reporting related health problems such as heart disease and diabetes, with numbers of the latter expected to climb from 537 million to almost 800 million by 2045.
