Dani Blum in The New York Times:
Ozempic and other drugs like it have proven powerful at regulating blood sugar and driving weight loss. Now, scientists are exploring whether they might be just as transformative in treating a wide range of other conditions, from addiction and liver disease to a common cause of infertility. “It’s like a snowball that turned into an avalanche,” said Lindsay Allen, a health economist at Northwestern Medicine. As the drugs gain momentum, she said, “they’re leaving behind them this completely reshaped landscape.” Much of the research on other uses of semaglutide, the compound in Ozempic and Wegovy, and tirzepatide, the substance in Mounjaro and Zepbound, is only in the early stages. One of the biggest questions scientists are seeking to answer: Do the benefits of these drugs just boil down to weight loss? Or do they have other effects, like tamping down inflammation in the body or quieting the brain’s compulsive thoughts, that would make it possible to treat far more illnesses?
We won’t likely know anytime soon. “We’re still learning how these medicines work,” said Dr. Daniel Drucker, one of the first researchers to study these drugs. (Dr. Drucker consults for Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy.) People with the conditions below, many of whom have few good options for treatment, could benefit in the long run if these trials are successful. And for weight-loss drugmakers, every new use could catapult the drugs even further into blockbuster status. Some of these applications — including for heart disease and sleep apnea, which each affects tens of millions of people — have become targets for these companies and could prove especially lucrative. These medications are a “gold mine,” Dr. Allen said. “There is no upper bound for where the market is going.”
More here.