Dr. Paul Joyce

And so I think that is the dangerous side of it is people

There are people that are now taking them without the need to because they're using them to lose a little bit of weight and that can have potentially some long-lasting side effects that people are not aware of.

In Australia, we're fortunate in the sense that it's pretty tightly regulated and hopefully that will remain to be the case.

But there are concerns and there's ever-evolving this landscape, so there's more and more drugs coming out.

There's now oral options, so instead of having to use it as an injection, you can take it orally.

And so now moving to an oral option where the drug can be absorbed just through a tablet, obviously that makes it much more accessible for people as well that have a fear or phobia of needles and injections.

And so that is going to change more and more over time as well.

They are, they're remarkable drugs.

I'm always hesitant to say it's a miracle drug because I do have concerns over, you know, things like the long-term safety, but they are remarkable.

And I think probably the best way to think about it is most drugs normally have one target that they target within the body.

They target one organ and they target one disease.

The difference here is because this is a hormone that is naturally produced in the body.

It has a range of effects in the body.

And so because we're mimicking that hormone, this drug can have wide ranging effects.

I like using analogies because it helps people understand it a bit better.

You can think of it as a house that needs renovations and has lots of issues.

You could have leaky pipes, the kitchen needs doing, the roof needs doing.

In most cases, drugs target one of those things so they can patch up the leaky pipe and another drug can patch up or do the kitchen.

But in this case we've got a drug that is seemingly being able to do a lot of things at once and so it can fix that whole house with one drug.

Obviously it hasn't been shown to do that just yet but there are some really promising signs for how these drugs can be used cautiously.