A New Approach to Marketing Diet Drugs

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Diet drugs earned a bad rep over the years: vanity, abuse, side effects. A decade of fen-phen lawsuits didn't help either.

So why are there at least three companies working so hard to take their weight-loss treatments to market? Americans are getting fatter, and their doctors are telling them to shed the pounds.

Vivus Inc., a money-losing biotech company in California, filed an application with U.S. officials to sell its experimental drug Qnexa to treat obesity. Just last week another company, San Diego-based Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc., submitted its new drug application for the weight-loss treatment Lorcaserin.

At least one other company, Orexigen Therapeutics Inc., also based in San Diego, is expected to file next year for permission to sell yet another obesity drug.

Orexigen's obesity treatment Contrave is its most advanced experimental product just as Qnexa and Lorcaserin are lead products for Vivus and Arena.

"The time is right because there is such an epidemic," says Peter Tam, president and chief operating officer of Vivus.

Indeed, obesity is growing faster than any previous public health problem that the nation has faced, Emory University health care economist Ken Thorpe says. In a study he released last month, Thorpe concluded that if current trends continue, 43 percent of American adults will be obese by 2018, driving related health care costs to $344 billion, four times the amount spent now.

In human studies, Vivus showed that its drug helped people lose as much as 15 percent of weight. That's far more than reductions reported by the leading drugs on the market for long-term weight loss, Abbott Laboratories' Meridia and Roche Holding AG's Xenical. GlaxoSmithKline Plc sells a low-dose, over-the-counter version of Xenical called Alli.

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