Tag Archives: health

Eli Lilly’s New Weight Loss Drug May Have the Worst Name in Pharmaceutical History

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Eli Lilly announced clinical trial results this week for a daily pill to treat obesity and diabetes. Its name is absolutely terrible.

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced promising clinical trial results this week for a daily pill to treat obesity and diabetes.

Besides the good news of minimal side effects and impressive results, though, the pill has an extremely unfortunate quality: its name.

The drug, which was first discovered by Chugai Pharmaceutical and licensed to Eli Lilly in 2018, is called "orforglipron," a word so perplexingly unpronounceable — "or fugly pron"? — that it defies belief.

According to the company, it's pronounced "or-for-GLIP-ron," which is such a mouthful that it's nearly impossible to imagine it becoming a household name like "Ozempic."

The pharmaceutical industry has a long and well-earned reputation for cooking up terrible names for drugs, from the anti-cancer medication "carfilzomib" to the melanoma treatment "talimogene laherparepvec" to "idarucizumab," which counteracts the blood-thinning effects of other medications.

But there are several good reasons why the names are so bonkers. For one, clinicians have warned that if they sound too similar, they could lead to potentially dangerous prescription errors.

It also takes years for a drug to get its name, a process that requires drugmakers to abide by a complex system of international rules.

A system of prefixes and stems indicating what the drug does often determines the name of a drug. According to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health publication Global Health NOW, drugmakers must avoid the letters Y, H, K, J, and W, which aren't used in all Roman alphabet-based languages.

Some drug names end up being completely made up, making no reference to anything, in what's referred to as an "empty vessel." (The most famous example is Prozac.)

To be clear, the word "orforglipron" won't appear on Eli Lilly's consumer-facing packaging if it ever hits the market. It's the drug's generic name, so it could eventually be marketed under a different brand name.

The medication is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist, much like the extremely popular semaglutide-based injections, such as Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Ozempic.

But what sets it apart is the fact that it's a "small-molecule" agonist that can be taken orally and at "any time of the day without restrictions on food and water intake," according to Eli Lilly.

Scientists are hoping that orforglipron, which belongs to an emerging class of "glipron" medications, could provide an easy-to-administer alternative to other diabetes and obesity drugs.

A separate glipron, which has the slightly-less-headache-inducing name "danuglipron," is currently being developed by Pfizer. Like orforglipron, it's a once-a-day weight management pill.

However, the pharmaceutical firm ran into some trouble two years into developing and testing the drug, finding that the pill had caused "liver injury" in a study participant earlier this year.

Eli Lilly appears to have had far more success, announcing promising Phase 3 trial results last week. The news caused the pharmaceutical's share price to surge — and the stock of Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk to plummet.

More on weight loss drugs: Human Experiments on GLP-1 Pill Looking Extremely Promising

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New Bionic Hand Can Detach From User, Crawl Around and Do Missions on Its Own

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The world's first wireless bionic hand, built by Open Bionics, can be fully detached and operate on its own.

A UK startup called Open Bionics has just unveiled the world's first wireless bionic arm, called Hero — and it's so advanced that the hand can fully detach and amble about on its own, like the Addams Family's Thing.  

19-year-old influencer Tilly Lockey, a double-amputee who's been using Open Bionics' arms for the past nine years and has been a poster child for the company's efforts, recently showed off this incredibly sci-fi capability after being one of the first to receive the new device.

"I can move it around even when it's not attached to the arm," Lockey said in an interview with Reuters. "It can just go on its own missions — which is kinda crazy."

Lockey lost both her hands to meningitis as a toddler. Effortlessly, she pulls off the still writhing bionic hand, then places it on her bed to send it inching towards her phone.  

"The hand can crawl away like it's got a mind of its own," Lockey said.

A world-first from @openbionics. ? pic.twitter.com/BjyFp05Meu

— Sammy Payne ???? (@SighSam) April 11, 2025

Lockey is wearing two Hero PRO prototypes, which like all of Open Bionics's prosthetics are fully 3D-printed. Unlike some alternatives out there, the Hero arms don't rely on a chip implant, which requires invasive surgery and can lead to medical complications. Instead, it uses wireless electromyography (EMG) electrodes that the company calls "MyoPods" that are placed on top of the amputated limbs, sensing specific muscle signals.

In other words, it's fully muscle-operated. As Lockey explains, it primarily works off of two signals: a squeeze motion with her arm that closes the hand, and a flex motion that opens it. More advanced movements like hand gestures are performed through something like a "menu system," she said.

After working closely with Open Bionics for nearly a decade now, one thing that's surprised her the most with the new arms is how strong they are. "I'm not used to being that strong yet," Lockey told Reuters. "When I first put them on... I was, like, crushing everything."

The level of progress overall has startled her, she said. Open Bionics has been working on the prototype for four years.

"I now have 360-degree rotation in my wrists, I can flex them too. There literally isn't a single other arm that can do this," Lockey said in a statement. "No other arm is wireless and waterproof, and it's faster than everything else and it's still the lightest bionic hand available. I don't know how they've done it."

More on: Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete

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Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump’s Cruelty

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Around 15 of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist David Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US.

Last year, University of Washington School of Medicine professor of biochemistry David Baker won the Nobel Prize for his work on designing proteins that can be used in drugs, vaccines, materials, and sensors.

But now that the Trump administration has begun to diminish the role of research and gut scientific funding, around 15 of Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US, NBC News reports.

A major funding squeeze is forcing Baker and his colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design to reevaluate and cut back.

"There’s so many amazing people who want to come in, and we can’t take them," he told NBC. "The Nobel Prize was just a little blip. But things have gotten quite bleak."

Trump's war on science in the US has sparked concerns over a major brain drain, with a Nature poll of more than 1,200 scientists finding that a startling 75 percent are now considering leaving the country.

The Trump administration has gutted federal agencies, with the National Institutes of Health ringing the alarm bells following massive layoffs and budget cuts. Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been ordered to be canceled by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

"Right now, due to the funding cuts, we are unable to enroll any more participants into federally funded studies, or start new studies, or do really any new work," UW Medicine infectious disease researcher Rachel Bender Ignacio, who cut her own salary to distribute money to the rest of other staffers, told NBC.

Even politically uncontroversial lines of research, including Alzheimer's and cancer, have been swept up in a major shrinking of funding, which could lead to significant slowdowns in progress toward treatments, cures, and other interventions.

"We’ve gone through a bunch of contingency planning," University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center director Thomas Grabowski told NBC, referring to grant decisions slowing to a crawl. "When it starts to look like multiple, multiple, multiple months, then there’s not a good answer to your question."

The university received about 1,2200 grants from the NIH, worth around $648 million, last year. This year that approval process ground to a halt, and more than 600 grants are still in limbo.

Scientists are now in the dark, awaiting some much-needed clarity from the agency, which has spent much of its resources pointlessly chasing after president Donald Trump's number-one bogeyman: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

"The fact that they’re cutting these things or putting them in limbo is really upsetting, and you know, I feel like they’re doing surgery with a chainsaw at the federal level," retired attorney Andrea Gilbert, who had undergone treatment for Alzheimer's disease under Grabowski's care, told NBC News.

More on the NIH: Trump Administration Throws Cancer Research Into Turmoil

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Huge Study Finds Constellation of Health Benefits for Ozempic Beyond Weight Loss

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In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss. 

In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, this new study led by Ziyad Al-Aly of the Veteran's Affairs health system in St. Louis tracked millions of diabetes patient outcomes over a period of 3.5 years.

Of those, over 215,000 had been prescribed a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist receptor — the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, and others — and 1.7 million were on another form of blood sugar-lowering medicine.

Looking at other disorders in the data ranging from Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's to kidney disease and opiate addiction, Al-Aly and his team found that those who were on GLP-1 medications saw significant improvement across a staggering range of health concerns — and far beyond anything clearly linked to weight or blood sugar.

Though many studies have found that these blockbuster drugs seem to be beneficial for specific disorders, "no one had comprehensively investigated the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 receptor agonists across all possible health outcomes," the physician-scientist told Nature.

In particular, Al-Aly said that the drugs' impact on addiction disorders "stood out" to him, with 13 percent of the GLP-1 cohort who had issues with addiction seeing improvement — a finding that dovetails with other studies about these drugs and their effect on addiction.

Other apparent benefits were even harder to make sense of. Al-Aly and his team also discovered that psychotic disorder risk was lowered by 18 percent for the GLP-1 cohort, and the Alzheimer's risk was cut by 12 percent.

"Interestingly, GLP-1RA drugs act on receptors that are expressed in brain areas involved in impulse control, reward and addiction — potentially explaining their effectiveness in curbing appetite and addiction disorders," Al-Aly said in a statement published by the University of Washington, which was also involved in the study. "These drugs also reduce inflammation in the brain and result in weight loss; both these factors may improve brain health and explain the reduced risk of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia."

While those findings are indeed incredible, the researchers also found that other issues seemed to be exacerbated by taking GLP-1s. Along with an 11 percent increase in arthritis risk, the team found a whopping 146 percent increase in cases of pancreatitis — another discovery that complements prior research into the drugs' dark side.

Though that figure is pretty jarring, Al-Aly seemed to take it in stride.

"Given the drugs’ newness and skyrocketing popularity, it is important to systematically examine their effects on all body systems — leaving no stone unturned — to understand what they do and what they don’t do," he said in the UWash press release.

By looking so deeply into the drugs, these scientists are, as Al-Aly puts it, drawing a "comprehensive atlas mapping the associations" of GLP-1 drugs that looks into all of their effects on the body — an important quest as they continue to rise in popularity and usage.

More on GLP-1s: Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing

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Huge Study Finds Constellation of Health Benefits for Ozempic Beyond Weight Loss

Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing

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For some, the issue with GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy isn't getting access to these game-changing medications, but having them not work.

The fever-pitch hype around GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro makes them sound like game-changing medications, and for many they are — but for other patients, the experience is totally underwhelming.

In an interview with the Associated Press, 38-year-old Danielle Griffin said that although she was able to get a prescription for Novo Nordisk's weight loss shot Wegovy — and even got it covered by her insurance, which is still often a struggle — the medication just didn't work for her.

"I have been on Wegovy for a year and a half," Griffin said, "and have only lost 13 pounds."

Despite doing "everything right," including dieting, exercising, and drinking lots of water, she's had "no success" with the popular weight loss injectable.

"It’s discouraging," Giffin said.

While there's been scrutiny on a laundry list of side effects that can come with glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs, which seem to work by mimicking the body's feeling of fullness, non-responsiveness of this sort hasn't captured much attention.

Obesity experts told the AP, however, that up to 20 percent — or one in every five patients — may not lose weight on the drugs at all.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the news wire that because "different people have different responses," these drugs won't work the same for everyone who takes them.

From medications that stymie weight loss to differences in brain and gut chemistry, lots of factors influence how people metabolize GLP-1s, the Mass General doctor said.

"[Obesity] is a disease that stems from the brain," Stanford said. "The dysfunction may not be the same."

Endocrine specialist Jody Dushay of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said that she's also seen people have issues losing weight with GLP-1s — though generally, she and her patients are able to tell whether they're going to work within a few weeks.

Between non-responsiveness and undesirable gastrointestinal side effects like vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea, those who run into issues with drugs like Wegovy often feel at wit's end, Dushay said. There are plenty of other options, however, including switching to a different GLP-1.

"I tell them: it's not game over," the endocrinologist said.

Indeed, Griffin told the AP that she eventually switched over to Zepbound, a similar drug made by Eli Lilly — and that within just three months, she'd lost seven pounds.

"I’m hoping it’s slow and steady," the woman said.

More on GLP-1s: The Diet Industry Is Reportedly in Total Meltdown Over GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

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RFK Jr., Who Hates Adderall, Says Heroin Was Great for Treating His ADHD

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RFK Jr. admitted that using heroin helped him become a better student — but when it comes to actual ADHD meds, he's not having it.

The man Donald Trump has chosen to lead the United States' health system claimed that doing heroin helped him become a better student — the same month he said that people on Adderall should be sent to "wellness farms."

"I was at the bottom of my class, I started doing heroin, and I went to the top of my class," Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told podcaster Shawn Ryan in a newly-resurfaced clip from July. "Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying."

The political scion went on to acknowledge that he would "probably today be diagnosed with ADHD" and that using heroin and other drugs like cocaine were a form of self-medication.

When it comes to actual prescription medications, however, the 70-year-old anti-vaxxer sings a different tune.

The same month that the Ryan interview was posted, Kennedy told another podcaster that he would like to see what he calls "wellness farms" where people on medications including Adderall can go and get clean — while remaining pointedly vague on whether these stays would be voluntary.

"I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to," he told the "Latino Capitalist" podcast, "to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities."

And a few months prior, he made similar comments, sans the ominous mention of labor camps, in yet another podcast interview.

"Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on [anti-depressant] SSRIs. Why?" Kennedy told Todd Ault. "Doctors didn’t just start prescribing these for no reason. We have damaged this entire generation. We have poisoned them."

Taken together, these three remarks make it seem that in the mind of the man tapped to be our next Health and Human Services secretary, a powerful opioid is less severe a drug than Adderall — and to our minds, there's nothing healthy about that.

More on RFK Jr.: Trump's Raw Milk Zealot Accused of Inappropriately Touching Babysitter

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Deranged Mayor Promises "No More Fat People" With Free Ozempic Shots

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While seeking re-election, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro is making a huge campaign promise: free Ozempic for all.

While seeking re-election, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro is making a huge campaign promise: free Ozempic for all.

As Quartz reports, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes said that he lost 66 pounds after taking the popular weight-loss injectable manufactured by Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk.

"I took a lot of Ozempic, that little medicine that is helping everyone lose weight," Paes told Brazilian newspaper Extra, as translated by Quartz. "Its patent will expire next year, and it will be available as a generic and I will introduce it to the entire public health system."

As a note, the latter claim is not exactly true. Though there have been challenges to speed up the pace of generics in Brazil, the patent for semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, isn't slated to expire in the country until 2026.

After claiming he'd "introduce" the generic into the city's public health system without discussing how he would undertake such an endeavor as the leader of an individual municipality, the longtime Rio mayor then made an even bolder claim.

"Rio will be a city where there will be no more fat people," Paes declared. "Everyone will be taking Ozempic at family clinics."

Problematic fatphobia aside, Rio de Janeiro's population is a whopping 13.7 million people, making his claim a massive stretch.

Understandably, Paes' controversial comments opened him up to criticism from opponents in the mayoral election, which is set to occur on October 6.

Mayoral candidate Alexandre Ramagem, posted a carousel on his campaign's Instagram showing voters complaining online about lacking basic medical necessities in the face of Paes' comments. Fellow mayor hopeful Tarcísio Motta, meanwhile, said the comments were fatphobic and "disrespectful to the diversity of bodies" in Rio.

Hitting back, Paes insisted he isn't fatphobic and said he's only interested in the health of the city's populace.

"When the patent is broken, which should happen in 2025 or 2026, it will reduce the cost enormously," the longtime mayor said, referencing the 1,000 Brazilian Reals or roughly $182 it currently costs Brazilians to access the weight loss drug. "Why not make it available to the population?"

"We’re not going to give it away for vain reasons," he continued. "It’s not to make six-packs."

As usual, a politician is politicking — but in Rio, the personal seems to have become political.

More on Ozempic: People Are Apparently Microdosing Ozempic

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Doctors Suggest ‘Raw-Dogging’ Your Flight Is Bad For Your Health

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We regret to inform you that there's another semi-ironic and potentially harmful TikTok trend that's taking the internet by storm: "raw-dogging" a flight.

It's the ultimate act of ponderous, self-flagellating stoicism: instead of doing the normal things people do to kill time on a miserable, long-haul flight, you tough it out by doing… nothing.

Sit up straight, don't eat the complimentary peanuts or the frozen dinners, and don't watch a movie on the in-flight entertainment system or on one of your devices. Hell, don't even go to the bathroom or drink water. Be a man. Because all you need is discipline, grit — and maybe the in-flight map, which is apparently sacrosanct in the world of aerial raw-dogging.

According to doctors, who are universally bewildered by the trend, this is a very bad idea.

"They're idiots," general practitioner Gill Jenkins told BBC. "A digital detox might do you some good, but all the rest of it is against medical advice."

"I really have no idea why anyone would do it," Gin Lalli, a psychotherapist specializing in anxiety, stress, and depression, told Fortune. "You're better off sleeping than raw-dogging."

Erling Haaland just ‘raw dogged’ a seven hour flight. ?? [IG] pic.twitter.com/SVMpWSPwmf

— City Report (@cityreport_) August 4, 2024

And yet, people are doing it. Or they're at least pretending to. Soccer star and Manchester City striker Erling Haaland — who aficionados of the sport frequently joke is a robot — was one such celebrity to popularize the trend, jokingly or not.

"Just raw-dogged a seven hour flight," he posted in an Instagram story, vacantly staring at the seat in front of him. "No phone, no sleep, no water, no food, only map. #easy."

And, okay: this probably isn't a thing that people actually do. But it's undeniably become popular to joke about doing (or attempting), and we wouldn't rule out impressionable kids or pseudo-stoics giving it a shot for real.

"If you're not moving you're at risk of deep vein thrombosis, which is compounded by dehydration," Jenkins told BBC. "Not going to the toilet, that's a bit stupid. If you need the loo, you need the loo."

However, if you're not insane about it, raw-dogging — in severe moderation — could be beneficial for our device-addled brains.

"Not having access to emails or the ability to 'check in' means that we can create the space to engage our minds in thinking about other activities and people," Sophie Mort, a clinical psychologist at Headspace, told Fortune.  "When we grant ourselves the space to switch off, it offers an opportunity to focus on what genuinely makes us happy."

"So switching off — even if just when you are traveling — can be just the ticket when it comes to protecting our mental state," she added.

In short, it's fine to allow yourself a worldly pleasure or two when you're flying the red-eye in your cramped economy seat.

More on internet trends: Dentists Horrified by People Carving Off Tooth Enamel at Home

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