Aykut Karahan | Istock | Getty Images A version of this article first appeared in CNBC's Healthy Returns newsletter, which brings the latest health-care news straight to your inbox. Subscribe here to receive future editions. Happy Friday! Buried in the election news this week was new data from drugmakers vying to enter the booming weight loss drug market.
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and biotech company Viking Therapeutics were among the companies that presented encouraging data on their obesity pills and other treatments at the ObesityWeek conference in San Antonio, Texas, in recent days. Wall Street is betting that the new wave of growth in the obesity space will be driven by pills that could offer more convenience and potentially fewer side effects, which could keep patients on the drugs for longer. Analysts expect the weight loss drug market to be worth more than $100 billion by the end of the decade as more treatments emerge and help meet the demand that existing injections from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are still struggling to keep up with.
Here's what some of the data on the pills looked like. People who took the highest dose of Viking's daily pill lost an average of 6.8% of their body weight after 28 days when compared to those who received a placebo, according to results from an early-stage study on 92 people.
That outperformed investors' expectations of 5% to 6% weight loss when compared to a placebo, William Blair analyst Andy Hsieh said in a note on Monday. T.