The global boom in weight-loss drugs has reshaped human medicine, propelled pharmaceutical shares and redrawn expectations about chronic disease. Now drugmakers spy a new growth market in the US: portly pets.
Americans may fret over their waistlines, but their cats and dogs are in even worse shape. An estimated 60 per cent of the country’s cats and dogs are either overweight or obese according to a 2022 survey by the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. Diabetes — once rare in animals — is now among the most expensive chronic conditions in veterinary practice.
This is, of course, a financial opportunity. Owners lavish extraordinary sums on their animals. Pet spending reached $183bn in 2023, nearly four times 2003 levels, data from the Federal Reserve shows. If semaglutide can shrink a human waistline, why not a feline one? A handful of firms believe that obesity medicine, which transformed human healthcare in just a few years, could become a lucrative veterinary category.
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The most ambitious of these is Okava, a San Francisco start-up testing a GLP-1 drug — exenatide — delivered not by injection but by a miniature implant. Weekly injections may be tolerable for humans motivated by vanity; persuading a family to jab a struggling cat is another matter altogether. A long-acting implant that requires only two visits a year to the vet could solve the problem neatly.
Okava launched its first clinical trial, MEOW-1, earlier this month and hopes to eventually market the treatment for up to $200 a month. That is steep, but not outlandish in a world where “premium” pet foods cost just as much and elaborate veterinary insurance plans have become mainstream middle-class indulgences.
Yet the path to animal-size profits is far from smooth. Okava is only in the early-stage clinical trial phase of testing the drug. Lifestyle interventions such as diet and exercise remain veterinarians’ preferred first step. And history offers caution. In 2007, Pfizer got FDA approval for Slentrol, the first prescription weight-loss drug for dogs. After Pfizer spun off its Zoetis animal-health subsidiary, the therapy was discontinued because of limited demand.
The economics of veterinary obesity may now be shifting. Diabetes care for an animal is expensive and the process is laborious: twice-daily insulin injections, regular glucose monitoring and frequent vet visits. If GLP-1-based therapies can prevent the disease or send mild cases into remission, owners may embrace them not to discipline their pets’ diets but to avoid far greater costs later.
For drugmakers, the appeal is less sentimental. The human obesity-drug market may one day reach saturation; pet medicine, by contrast, remains under-developed. The incentives are aligned: anxious owners, rising chronic disease and a pharmacy sector hungry for new profit pools. Pharma’s next battleground, then, may be the living-room sofa — and the overfed creature sprawled across it.