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Jun 13

VCU study: weight-loss drug Ozempic could treat liver disease – Richmond Times-Dispatch

Lose Weight Comments Off on VCU study: weight-loss drug Ozempic could treat liver disease – Richmond Times-Dispatch

Weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have become blockbuster successes in the past year. Now they could assume a new role, according to research from Virginia Commonwealth University treating liver disease.

A study from the VCU Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health indicates those drugs can be combined with another medicine to reduce levels of liver fat and inflammation and cease scarring.

Turbocharging the Ozempic through the combination could become a game-changer for treating liver disease, said Dr. Arun Sanyal, the principal investigator for the study and the director of VCUs liver institute.

These findings are remarkable and exciting and open a new chapter in drug development for liver disease, Sanyal said.

Turbocharging the Ozempic through the combination of other medicines could become a "game-changer" for treating liver disease, said Dr. Arun Sanyal, the principal investigator for the study and the director of VCU's liver institute.

Made by Denmark-based Novo Nordisk, Ozempic and Wegovy are two forms of the same drug used to treat obesity and diabetes.

Since last year, they have skyrocketed in popularity in the United States. Ozempic sales reached almost $14 billion last year, with most sales coming from the U.S.

Ozempic is known as a GLP-1 agonist because it mimics a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, which stimulates insulin production in the pancreas, helps lower blood sugar levels and leads to weight loss.

Obesity, diabetes and liver disease are often correlated. More than 33 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, and between 5% and 7% develop significant liver disease, Sanyal said.

By itself, Ozempic does not treat liver disease.

But by combining the GLP-1 agonist with another agonist, the new drug has the potential to do what Ozempic cannot. It has shown the ability to reverse scarring, for which few medicines have shown such potential.

The combined drug is called survodutide, which has been used for treating liver disease since 2021. Scientists now refer to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH.

A healthy liver has a small amount of fat, but when the fat exceeds 5% of a livers weight, the fat can lead to serious health issues, such as cirrhosis and liver cancer. Serious scarring typically cannot be reversed and the only treatment is a liver transplant. Many patients often develop liver disease for years without displaying symptoms and do not become aware of their disease until it is too late.

The study involved 293 adults from 25 countries with MASH and varying stages of scarring. Some were given survodutide and others, placebos.

After 48 weeks of treatment using survodutide, up to 83% of participants saw measurable improvement of their disease, including lower levels of liver fat, inflammation and no worsening or scarring of the liver, known as fibrosis.

Three out of four patients showed their disease had resolved, meaning their livers were significantly less inflamed, fatty and scarred. Up to half of patients showed their liver enzymes and fibrosis improved a major success for the medicine.

Side effects such as nausea, diarrhea and vomiting were common. The results were published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Another phase of the trial is underway to determine if survodutide can help overweight or obese patients with fatty liver disease to lose weight and reduce their liver fat.

Only one drug, called resmetirom, has FDA approval to treat fatty liver disease.

In 1630, Englishman John Winthrop, leading a fleet carrying Puritan refugees, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became its governor.

In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)

In 1964, South African Black nationalist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison along with seven other people, including Walter Sisulu, for committing sabotage against the apartheid regime (all were eventually released, Mandela in 1990).

In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six Son of Sam .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to tear down this wall.

In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.)

Former mobster Henry Hill, the subject of the movie Goodfellas, died in Los Angeles a day after his 69th birthday.

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded; Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police.

In 2018, after a five-hour summit in Singapore, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a joint statement agreeing to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, although the timeline and tactics were left unclear; Trump declared that he and Kim had developed "a very special bond."

One year ago: Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by one of the two white officers who responded after he was found asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane of a Wendys restaurant in Atlanta; police body camera video showed Brooks struggling with the officers and grabbing a Taser from one of them, firing it as he fled. (An autopsy found that Brooks had been shot twice in the back. Officer Garrett Rolfe faces charges including murder.

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VCU study: weight-loss drug Ozempic could treat liver disease - Richmond Times-Dispatch

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