Smallish "Power Alley" Update: Rahway Sees Future Potential Well Beyond Weight Loss, For Its GLP-1 Candidate, Efinopegdutide...

Again -- this is not going to be material to Merck's NYSE share price today, or tomorrow -- but toward 2028. . . it very well could be.

Here's the latest, from Reuters, on it all:

. . .[Merck is] seeking GLP-1 treatments with benefits beyond weight loss, CEO Robert Davis said on Thursday at a conference.

Newer diabetes and weight-loss drugs of the GLP-1 class like Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Zepbound are expected to together generate annual sales of over $100 billion by the end of the decade.

Merck's experimental drug efinopegdutide, which belongs to the GLP-1 class and is being developed as a treatment for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), also showed a "compelling" weight-loss benefit. . . .

"I think everyone recognizes weight management is a hard thing to get reimbursed. But if you can show cardiovascular outcome, if you can show diabetes outcome, which you're starting to see data for, if you can see fatty liver disease benefits. . . that is an area where we think there's opportunity," he said. . . .

Personally, I am a little concerned that we don't fully understand the hows, and whys that allow this class of meds to result in significant weight loss, especially in obese diabetes patients. While I don't expect any sort of "thalidomide" longer term side effect, by any stretch of the imagination -- and there are clearly very compelling health benefits to obese patients simply losing weight, overall. . . I don't love the idea of this class being the most widely prescribed drug in the world by say 2030 or so, just yet.

I think we need more longitudinal data. But I am a lil' contrarian, in that way. Onward.

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