Your spam filter is full of it. Your favorite rapper is rapping about it. We're witnessing the dawn of the age of Ozempic—probably the most culturally pervasive pharmaceutical since the little blue pill.
That drug, semaglutide—sold by Novo Nordisk under the brand name Wegovy for weight loss and Ozempic for treating type 2 diabetes—is just the beginning. Another more effective weight-loss medication, Eli Lilly's Zepbound, is already available. Meanwhile, a whole host of other pharma companies are racing to capture a part of the exploding, multibillion-dollar weight-loss market with their own products.
The next wave of drugs will push for even more weight loss (Zepbound, in trials, saw patients lose more than 20 percent of body weight), greater convenience (perhaps by being taken orally daily rather than injected weekly), and fewer side effects. These drugs will also, companies hope, offer a solution to those who don't lose much weight on the existing crop of medicines.
Riding on the coattails of this wave are supplements businesses, which are also cashing in by offering complementary products that they say can help with side effects—or that can actually lead to weight loss themselves. Experts, though, are skeptical.
More promising is the ongoing research into what else weight-loss drugs might help with. Evidence is steadily growing that they promote good cardiovascular and organ health, and they're being investigated as treatments for addiction, Parkinson's, and other diseases. It's possible that what we now think of as weight-loss drugs will evolve into being broader "health promotion" medicines, WIRED biotech writer Emily Mullin reports.
That, though, will require people to be able to access them, and right now there is a yawning gap between supply and demand. Because of their huge popularity, Novo Nordisk's and Eli Lilly's drugs are in shortage, and in the United States, this means pharmacies are able to compound their own off-brand versions of the medicines. As WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs has found, many telehealth companies now are selling these copies online with minimal checks to see whether buyers meet the requirements for a prescription.
Where there's money to be made, systems will quickly appear to exploit it, and so WIRED will be following the development of the sector closely. Keep an eye on WIRED.com/Science throughout the year to see where else this journey takes us.
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