Dr. Rachel Bedard

On the one hand, we know that there are a bunch of cancers for which obesity is a risk factor.

Breast cancer is like that.

Colon cancer is like that.

GLP-1s seem to help with those.

There are a bunch of cancers where we don't think of obesity as being a risk factor, where GLP-1s, because of this anti-inflammatory sort of impact, we're not totally sure, may also play a role.

So there are trials to look at cancer prevention.

There are trials to look at Alzheimer's prevention.

The first Alzheimer's prevention trial...

was negative, which means the drug didn't make a difference.

But I don't think it's conclusively negative that it doesn't help with Alzheimer's prevention or treatment necessarily.

There should be more trials to be done there.

There are trials happening in Parkinson's disease.

These are big, extremely common conditions that either lead to death or that totally derail people's lives.

And so the potential benefits that are still under-characterized or unproven are super exciting.

I mean, one that's sort of been studied some, but I think not in a way that's super, super conclusive, is for some people it does seem to provoke a depression.

There's been this concern about increased suicidality that has not borne out in studies thus far, but like it's on the radar as a thing that people are concerned about.

But these psychiatric neurologic complications I'm interested in and paying attention to.

The most common side effects with these drugs are the GI side effects, so like bad nausea and vomiting and constipation.

And so I'm really interested in both increased clarity around what standard of care looks like for prescribing them to minimize those side effects and whether these future side

like GLP-1 2.0, 3.0, 4.0s are going to improve that side effect profile because that would actually make a very big difference.