What a desert lizard teaches us about patents and the GLP-1 revolution

After steadily rising for decades, America’s obesity rate is finally declining. It peaked in 2022, when 39.9% of adults were obese, according to Gallup. This year, that share dipped to 36.4% — in large part thanks to increasingly widespread GLP-1 weight-loss medicines.About one in every nine adults currently takes Wegovy, Zepbound, or another GLP-1. That’s roughly a ten-fold increase since 2022.And that share will likely keep rising as the price of these drugs continues to drop. As recently as last year, the weight-loss treatments cost over $1,000 per month. Today, patients can purchase them for as little as $149 a month — because the leading GLP-1 manufacturers have been forced to slash prices to compete for market share.Americans can thank a desert lizard—and the patent system—for these increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly affordable treatments.The story begins in 1990, when John Eng, an endocrinologist at the Veterans Administration, isolated a peptide from the venom of Gila monsters, the nearly two-foot-long lizards native to the Southwest. That peptide mimicked the human hormone GLP-1, which prompts the pancreas to release insulin and makes people feel full. But unlike natural GLP-1, which disappears from the body within minutes, this compound remains active for hours.

Dr. Eng patented the peptide. Amylin Pharmaceuticals eventually licensed and developed it into the first GLP-1 medicine. In 2005, the FDA approved it to treat type 2........

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