Eli Lilly will begin studies to see if its blockbuster weight-loss #medicines can also be used to treat addictive behaviors like alcohol abuse, smoking and drug addiction, #CEO Dave Ricks said to David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, DC. #health #healthcare #business

Where do you wanna take your company now? You can't find any drug that's gonna be more successful than the one you have. Is this, you're just gonna keep promoting this drug? Is that your biggest thing? Or there's no other drug I can imagine that could be anything comparable to this. Well, we can imagine that. And so we're trying to. First of all, within the obesity metabolic health space, I think there's two things I'm very excited about. One is we have terzapatide, Monjaro, ZepBound on the market. We have 11 other pipeline projects aimed at the same problem, but in different ways. So we have a triple acting medicine that's in phase three for those that have even higher body weight or more severe health problems. We have the oral project, nine others beyond that. We think this is going to be a very large segment with many different types of medicines for different conditions and different situations people might find themselves in. We're gonna exploit that fully. The second thing is we've talked a lot about like cardiovascular health, diabetes, these conditions that one's think about with being overweight. But these medicines we think and we've aimed to prove can be useful for other things we don't think about connected to weight. These are often called anti-hedonics. So they are reducing that desire cycle. So next year, you'll see Lilly start large studies in alcohol abuse and nicotine use, even in drug abuse. We'll also begin studies in anti-inflammatory conditions because you don't think of that with weight, but actually there is a quite a strong signal in anti-inflammatory.