Meg Tirrell

The last time we talked on the podcast, you and I talk about them constantly.

In terms of medicines, drugs, these are some of the biggest drugs of all time.

In terms of money spent, but also the number of people who are taking these.

I mean, millions of people are now on GLP-1 drugs, most of them for weight loss, also for diabetes.

And increasingly, they're getting approved for other indications.

They're showing they work

for liver disease, chronic kidney disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, preventing a second heart attack or stroke if you've already had one, heart failure.

I mean, they're being tested in so many different things.

So they're huge.

Well, the industry has tried this before.

They've tried to develop drugs for weight loss before, and they haven't been successful.

They had side effects.

They were dangerous to take for some people.

And they didn't produce very much weight loss.

So they just weren't working for a lot of people.

And so the industry was kind of shy to come to obesity drugs again.

And then this class of diabetes drugs and sort of tellingly, it's these huge companies in diabetes, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which have worked in insulin for almost a century, that brought these drugs to the market for obesity.

And I mean, these drugs work for both diabetes and obesity and now all these other things as well.

Yeah, well, the idea is essentially that it's not changing your body really other than that you're losing weight.

But essentially, if you stop taking these medications, your appetite does go up.