Eli Lilly seeks to expand Zepbound use to treat sleep apnea

Eli Lilly (LLY) is reporting success in the use of Zepbound — one of the pharmaceutical giant's landmark GLP-1 weight-loss drugs — to treat sleep apnea.

Yahoo Finance Health Reporter Anjalee Khemlani joins The Morning Brief to discuss Eli Lilly's filing for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for this use case and how it may affect makers of CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) sleep devices, such as Philips (PHG) and ResMed (RMD).

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Morning Brief.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

Lily announcing results of its sleep apnea trial for that down saying the weight loss drug helps resolve sleep apnea and up to 51% of patients for more.

We got Yahoo finances on, came on on what you got.

That's right.

This is an exciting sort of new chapter for because this breaks open the Medicare reimbursement channel for them, which is exactly what happened with what go for.

No, no.

Once you get that additional label, that's when you can at that government reimbursement which is still blocked from covering weight loss drugs.

So that's really the big news for Eli Lilly.

We did know these results were coming, we saw positive uh, outlooks from the earlier stages in the trials.

Meanwhile, Eli Lily has already applied with the FDA for approval.

So let's take a look at what happened.

So they said that that bound quote resolved, uh a sleep obs obstructive sleep apnea, which basically means that it is less than five incidents in an in an hour in a night.

They looked at 43% reduction in those that are not using those pat machines, those masks machines at night and 51% reduction for those that did.

That's a higher percentage of patients were treated with a higher dose of the drug.

So 10 or 15, depending on what their tolerability was, if you recall the weight loss drugs do have higher doses than their diabetes counterparts.

And so with that, Lily is opening the door, this could impact some analysts are saying the sleep apnea machine maker.

So Phillips is one of them is ResMed is another.

So there are some companies that have actually seen their stock go down as a result of this news, but some others are warning that it may not be as bad considering those results that you saw.

Meanwhile, we also know of course that this then opens the door like I mentioned one analyst from J PM saying that quote, this clearly supports the addition of the label expansion for expansion for sleep apnea and that will allow for reimbursement from the Medicare population.

We know that there is a bill in the house right now looking to open up weight loss drug coverage for Medicare.

So two ways for this to really open the door for both he lightly and no, no.