GL GLP-1 drugmakers Loading... : Investor Sentiment and Bull/Bear Views

A new study out of St Louis mined anonymized VA medical records, comparing 1.2 million diabetics on no treatment with about 215,000 patients on GLP-1 receptor agonists and 600,000 on other diabetes drugs, which isolates the effect of the GLP-1 class. Across hundreds of thousands of patients the GLP-1 cohort showed lower hazard ratios for serious outcomes: roughly a 30% lower probability of cardiac arrest, plus reduced shock, hepatic failure, respiratory failure and schizophrenia. The only elevated risks were abdominal and gastrointestinal in nature (about 8-10% more nausea and vomiting, reflux, indigestion, sleep disturbance and musculoskeletal complications). Friedberg argues the benefits are not simply a by-product of appetite suppression: binding the GLP-1 receptor sets off a gene-expression cascade that switches off inflammatory markers and switches on repair genes, and the effects are now showing up in non-obese patients too, so the addressable benefit of the drug class is far wider than weight loss.

Chamath argues the commercial success of the GLP-1 products is driven by cognitive load, not just efficacy. Competing wellness protocols from Gary Brecka, Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson are each slightly different, and even with multiple doctors he found that the added complexity made his own care worse rather than better. A busy person with a job and kids cannot resolve that, so a product you simply take that solves the problem in one step wins by default. On that basis he expects these products to keep growing pretty dramatically, helped by oral pill formulations that he says are almost here.