ASTRAZENECA chief executive officer Pascal Soriot envisions his company bringing more affordable drugs to people who need to lose a modest amount of weight for health reasons but do not necessarily have obesity.

One day after the UK drugmaker announced a deal to develop an obesity pill with a Chinese biotech, Eccogene, Soriot said the company is aiming for a once-daily pill that’s less costly to produce than injectable obesity medicines, such as Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and newly approved Zepbound from Eli Lilly & Co. That would allow AstraZeneca to sell it at a far lower price than those drugs, which go for more than US$1,000 a month in the US.

If it works, “we will price it at a level that will democratise weight loss”, he said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York, pointing to the potential for sales around the world. Right now, 95 per cent of Novo’s Wegovy sales are in the US.

Novo and Lilly have a giant lead in the race to develop new drugs for diabetes and obesity that target a blood-sugar lowering hormone called GLP-1. Novo’s Ozempic for diabetes and its sister drug Wegovy are generating billions of US dollars in sales and have made Novo the biggest company in Europe by market capitalisation. Sales are also surging for Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drug Mounjaro for diabetes. Earlier this week, Lilly snagged US approval to sell the same drug for obesity under the name Zepbound.

Like many other drugmakers, AstraZeneca is racing to catch up. With the Eccogene deal, it now has two drugs in early-stage trials for obesity. The Eccogene drug is essentially an attempt to make a pill version of drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound. While still needing extensive study before it might be available, it could offer greater convenience and a lower price point than current GLP-1 drugs that must be injected weekly, Soriot said.

Global sales of obesity drugs could hit US$100 billion a year if there’s also a market for cash-paying customers seeking cosmetic weight loss who cannot get prescriptions covered by insurance, he said.

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Astra aims to make drugs that will become a staple of preventive health, Soriot said, rather than addressing weight loss alone. The CEO said he envisions pairing the company’s obesity drug with other Astra products, such as Farxiga, which reduces the risk of kidney failure.

“There is the health weight-loss market and there’s the cosmetic weight-loss market,” Soriot said. “Our focus mostly has been on organ protection.”

Meanwhile, Astra is testing a separate experimental compound that’s a long-acting analogue to a hormone called amylin. It could someday be used in combination with the Eccogene pill for people who need greater amounts of weight loss, Soriot said.

Astra has a lot of work to do to catch up. Its Eccogene pill comes after similar efforts at Lilly and Novo that are further along in testing. Most patients prefer pills to injections, Soriot said.

It is not too late for other competitors to come in and grab a significant portion of the market, Soriot said. For example, Astra’s Crestor was approved in the US more than 15 years after the first rival cholesterol-lowering statin drug hit the market, but its potency allowed it to capture billions in sales. BLOOMBERG