By Bill Alpert

The biotech firm Structure Therapeutics said its GLP-1 pill helped patients lose over 16% of their weight, on average, in a 10-month drug trial. Weight loss continued the longer patients took the pill, with no plateau in sight, the company said.

That's more weight loss than was achieved in studies of the Wegovy pill that Novo Nordisk began marketing in January, or a pill that Eli Lilly is expected to launch soon. In premarket trading Monday, Structure stock was up 10%, to $59.

Monday's results were for two high doses of Structure's pill, aleniglipron. The company previously reported weight loss of 15% on a lower dose. Monday's announcement said that patients who'd remained on that lower dose lost up to 16% of their weight in 53 weeks. Side effects and dropouts from the studies were in line with those of most GLP-1 drugs, Structure said.

These Phase 2 results will help Structure decide the dose to use when it begins a Phase 3 trial in the second half of this year.

The performance of Structure's pill may be good enough to make it an attractive takeover target for a larger pharmaceutical company looking to enter the drug industry's fastest-growing category. In a note earlier this month, H.C. Wainwright analyst Ananda Ghosh called aleniglipron "the most acquirable asset in obesity".

By comparison, the average weight loss in the Phase 3 trial of Novo's Wegovy pill was 14%. Last summer, Lilly reported 12.4% weight loss in Phase 3 studies of its orforglipron pill.

Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com

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March 16, 2026 10:46 ET (14:46 GMT)

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