Can AI Drive Peloton’s Comeback?
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Is Peloton making a comeback? Motley Fool Money starts now.
Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Travis Hoyum, joined today by Rachel Warren and John Quast. I do want to get to Peloton because they have a really fascinating story over the last few years. But we're going to start with one of the big deals of the week. That is Pfizer winning a bid against Novo Nordisk for Metzera. Rachel, I got through all of that word salad, so I'm I'm proud of myself there. This is an obesity treatment startup, so they don't actually have a product out there. But there was a bidding war for these companies. What do we need to know about Pfizer actually? It seems like getting into the weight loss game that they have not had a lot of success, like companies like Eli Lilly and Novo Norris.
This is an area that Pfizer has wanted to expand into for a while now. You might remember at one point, they actually had their own GLP-1 candidate. They had to discontinue that back in April of this year. There had been a bidding war that essentially erupted between Pfizer and Novonordisk for Metzera. That started back after Pfizer's initial offer in September. Pfizer ultimately won the bid. They had a sweetened offer of up to $10 billion. And this acquisition could really position Pfizer in the long run in the highly competitive and obviously growing obesity treatment market where they've previously struggled with their own development. So, Metzera has a pipeline of drug candidates for metabolic diseases that target different gut hormones that offer some really key advantages in efficacy and tolerance.
Really a key feature of the drugs that Mitzera is developing is the potential for once-monthly dosing. That would be a significant improvement over the weekly injections of current treatments. So their lead candidates, one's a monthly injectable GLP-1 receptor. They're also working on an oral version. They've also got a monthly amylin analog candidate. And Pfizer plans to use their own manufacturing and commercial infrastructure to help accelerate Mitzera's drugs, which is a really key advantage. So good things happening from this deal.
So for those of us who are not quite as familiar with the pharmaceutical space, is this sort of another entrant into the GLP-1? Because we've been hearing about GLP-1s for years. The prices are starting to come down. We've heard about there's some oral treatments that are coming to market, I believe, next year. There's a bunch of stuff that's in clinical trial right now, is this another expansion of the market or is this going to be a game changer? Are these incremental improvements that are being made? Yes, a monthly injection is better than a weekly injection, but if it's $500 and the weekly is $200, that will maybe make the difference. Is that the way to think about it? It's at least getting Pfizer into the game, but it does increase competition?
Yeah, I think that's a fair way to put it, especially because these candidates, while certainly notable to add into Pfizer's wheelhouse, are not nearly as advanced as many of the other ones we're talking about from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, who are working, of course, on their own oral formulations. Eli Lilly notably has their next-generation GLP-1 that they're going to be seeking regulatory approval for in the coming months. now, those are the two key leaders, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. You have a lot of other companies working on their own versions. I think as the years progress, it's going to become a more competitive space. You're not just going to have these two dominant players. I think that's where Pfizer sees an opportunity to join that space, so to speak, and maybe differentiate with their own products in the future.
John, we've been hearing about GLP-1s for a very long time. This is another big check that's being written for a GLP-1 maker, or at least a potential maker in the future. Is this just kind of another fad that's going to eventually come and go?
I think everything is a fad, Travis. It's amazing how much human beings are prone to herd mentality with things.
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