Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

It’s a bumpy ride right now for people who are trying to make a business of providing obesity care. This really applies to all segments — consumer weight management, medical obesity care, pharmaceuticals, surgery — but the most visible evidence of bumpiness is playing out in the pharmaceutical segment of obesity care. On one hand, […]

On Friday, when most people had gone for the Memorial Day weekend, came this headline from a press release: Treatment with Saxenda® for Three Years Reduced the Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes Compared with Placebo Ordinarily, releasing information in this way would done to bury bad news that you had to get behind you. In this […]

People living with obesity are finally beginning to see more options for obesity care and, in part, they can thank competition to innovate in diabetes care for some of this progress. A particularly visible example of this is liraglutide, which has been available for treating type 2 diabetes since 2009. After six years of use […]

Investment in obesity research and development is a scarce resource. There’s no supply of money to burn. So the news of the termination of a large, expensive cardiovascular outcomes trial of naltrexone/bupropion (Contrave) is sad news indeed. This was the inevitable result of a mistake involving premature release of interim data from this study. As […]

If you compare ideas about obesity from the 1950s to some of the current thinking about the subject, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s way past time for rethinking obesity. Key themes of that era still dominate popular thinking today: you’re just eating too much, it’s a simple matter of calories in and calories […]

Belief and knowledge become easily confused in matters of nutrition, obesity, and health. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with strong beliefs. But believing something to be true is very different from knowing it, and that’s where the problem lies. We have a lot of strong beliefs about what should work to prevent or treat obesity, […]

Obesity is a unique challenge for global health. Other chronic diseases present problems that yield to systematic research, treatment, and prevention efforts. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and HIV have all become steadily more manageable. People affected by these diseases — even if cures might not be possible — can often lead relatively normal lives. For […]

As expected, Mysimba (naltrexone/bupropion, known as Contrave in the U.S.) became the second new obesity medicine to be fully approved for sale in Europe this week. This week broke a nine-year drought for new obesity medicines in Europe. Now analysts are busy trying to figure out who will be the winners in obesity treatment. Such […]

The European Commission granted final approval late yesterday for Novo Nordisk’s Saxenda brand of liraglutide 3mg to treat obesity. Saxenda is the first obesity treatment in nearly a decade to receive approval in Europe. Novo Nordisk is already in the final stages of preparing to launch Saxenda in the U.S., where it was approved late last […]

The announcement of the Apple Watch this week is one more example of how options for tracking your own physical activity are exploding. Also growing is the amount of money you can spend on a fitness tracker. And it seems that your employer’s interest in tracking you is growing, too. Apple’s Watch is pegged to be […]