Injectable and Oral GLP-1's Impact on The Clinical Landscape

Pharmaceutical Executive: Given the projected growth in GLP-1 modulator sales across both injection and oral routes, how do you foresee the clinical landscape evolving?
Madeline Verbeke: I think having the oral options, we could attract a lot of new patients to this space. We have patients who have that fear or aversion to needles, and this kind of opens up the door for them, and then, even in patients without the needle phobia, the convenience of an oral option will be appealing. I do think the injectables will still remain popular, just due to the difference in efficacy between the two. We've seen that injectables are more efficacious than orals. But I do think there's a place for orals in the market, both clinically and just efficacy wise. But I think that the patient demand is very high right now for GLP-1’s, so just having more options is going to be a great thing. I will have to see how that impacts access afterwards.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What do you see as the clinical and scientific hurdles oral GLP-1 formulations need to overcome to gain comparable traction?
Madeline Verbeke: I think kind of what I mentioned before, they're going to have to overcome that efficacy difference. Kind of find that patient population that's not as important to them. There's plenty of patients who don't need that 20% weight reduction. 12% is plenty. So I think kind of finding a space among those patients will be helpful. And I think that on the access side of things, we could see it kind of going either way. So like on one hand, the oral options being very cost effective, insurers might be more willing to cover these. It might be easier for prescribers to have like, get them to their patients, especially if we're seeing that overall cost reduction in a patient's healthcare with the preventative effects. But on the other hand, if the oral GLP ones really increase demand, we might kind of see the opposite happen, and we might see payers really tightening the reins on restrictions for these drugs, just because they want to avoid paying even more for these products than they already have. So I think it's going to have to be like a balance between clinical and actual, like access to these drugs.