General Discussion

The world’s most popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs are linked to a powerful new possible benefit: better outcomes for cancer patients.

A suite of four new studies suggest that people taking so-called GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro saw reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death and less risk of developing breast cancer.

“It’s really provocative that they showed, in several cancers, that people who took these drugs seem to have a lower risk of their cancer returning,” said Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, a breast oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who wasn’t involved in any of the studies.

One study from researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Institute tracked more than 10,000 patients with early-stage cancers who started GLP-1 drugs after diagnosis and compared their disease progression to those on a different diabetes medication. Those on GLP-1s were less likely to see their cancer spread.

In lung cancer patients, the rate of progression to advanced disease was cut roughly in half—10% in GLP-1 users versus 22% in the comparison group. Breast cancer patients showed a similar pattern, with progression rates of 10% versus 20%. Colorectal and liver cancers also showed statistically significant reductions......

Other studies specifically looked at breast cancer, examining both whether GLP-1 users were less likely to develop the disease and whether they lived longer after diagnosis. An analysis from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center of more than 137,000 breast cancer patients found that more than 95% of GLP-1 users were alive after five years, compared with 89.5% for nonusers.

A University of Pennsylvania study of nearly 95,000 women undergoing breast imaging found those who had taken a GLP-1 drug were about 25% less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer, even after accounting for age, weight and other risk factors.