The $1 trillion GLP-1 revolution with Rod Wong

This is the first innovation in health care, not just drugs, all of health care, to create somewhere a little bit north of $1,000,000,000,000 in value. That sounds like a big number. Right? So let's contextualize that. Welcome to the RTW podcast. I'm your guest host, Stephanie Sirota. I'm a partner and chief business officer leading the strategic partnerships team at RTW Investments. Today, I'm speaking with Rod Wong, our founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer. Here we are today talking about one of our favorite topics, GLPs and obesity. Let me just start with a very, very basic question, but why are GLP ones so important? GLPs have been around for a while. GLPs started in diabetes with BIAADA, and then there has basically been iterative innovation over the last twenty years that finally moved it from diabetes now into obesity. It's the most common disease in Western society. I think it's over a hundred million Americans. It is highly linked to three of the top 10 causes of death. Cardiovascular disease, number one. Stroke and diabetes are on the list. It's also strongly associated with other diseases in the top 10, cancer, dementia, kidney disease. And I think the very good news is that we've started getting outcome studies from some of the GLPs. You're basically seeing improvements north of twenty percent, as high as thirty percent, depending on the disease. Improvements in heart failure, in kidney disease. We've had positive outcome studies in osteoarthritis, in fatty liver, and in sleep apnea. People's quality of life improves. It is probably the most significant medical advance in terms of the sheer numbers of impact that we've seen in a couple of decades. Now do you think we're seeing some of these better vitals, better stats on these patients who have been taking them because of the actual small molecule that they're taking, or is it because of the weight loss? The actual weight loss must be a huge component of that, but there are other things that are emerging that clearly are major contributors as well. For example, the impact of GLPPS on inflammation. Are you seeing differences that some might be better to target? Are you seeing differences that some might be better to target inflammation, some might be better to target other specific conditions? We're still pretty early days. But when you are moving to the next generation of GLP, what a lot of people are focused on are adding additional mechanisms, hitting multiple things at one time. Let's talk about where we are in the current cycle of obesity drug development. You're super, super early. Right now, the best GLPs are, of course, from Eli Lilly and Novo. Each one has a key active ingredient that they've built products around. So with Lilly, it's tirzepatide. They have the brand names Manjaro for type two diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. With Novo, it's semaglutide and there it's Ozempic and Wegovy. They're doing about 40,000,000,000 in sales …