Eli Lil­ly’s in­jectable obe­si­ty drug Zep­bound has been proven more ef­fec­tive than No­vo Nordisk’s We­govy. But in the bat­tle of the pills, it ap­pears to be the oth­er way around.

Lil­ly on Thurs­day dis­closed that its oral prod­uct or­for­glipron had dis­ap­point­ed in the first of two piv­otal tri­als, with weight loss of around 11% af­ter 72 weeks. This trails No­vo’s oral ver­sion of We­govy, which scored weight loss of 13% in a rough­ly com­pa­ra­ble tri­al.

But the pills, both of which are GLP-1 ag­o­nists, are not the on­ly ones in de­vel­op­ment. Roche, Viking Ther­a­peu­tics and Struc­ture Ther­a­peu­tics are some of the com­pa­nies al­so work­ing on oral obe­si­ty can­di­dates, and some re­sults, though ear­ly, look very promis­ing.

Eli Lil­ly, the world’s most valu­able phar­ma com­pa­ny, reeled in $15.56 bil­lion in rev­enue in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2025, but the sales beat was over­shad­owed by lack­lus­ter da­ta from a piv­otal read­out of its ex­per­i­men­tal obe­si­ty pill.

Rev­enue came in $1.1 bil­lion above Wall Street’s con­sen­sus of $14.4 bil­lion. Earn­ings per share were $6.29, above ex­pec­ta­tions of $5.57. The In­di­anapo­lis-based phar­ma raised its full-year rev­enue guid­ance to $60 bil­lion to $62 bil­lion from pri­or pro­jec­tions of $58 bil­lion to $61 bil­lion.

CEO David Ricks al­so de­liv­ered some clear push­back against the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s moves to low­er drug prices in the US based on its “most fa­vored na­tion” pol­i­cy. Ricks, who has de­vel­oped a close re­la­tion­ship with Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, said if the US de­cides to “im­port for­eign price con­trols,” it could im­pair Amer­i­can bio­phar­ma out­put and harm the de­vel­op­ment of fu­ture treat­ments.

Strand Ther­a­peu­tics, a start­up based on re­search from MIT, has raised $153 mil­lion in Se­ries B fi­nanc­ing to test mR­NA ther­a­pies that un­leash the im­mune sys­tem on can­cer, the com­pa­ny an­nounced Thurs­day.

It’s a boon for Strand, which has been work­ing on mR­NA tech­nol­o­gy for near­ly eight years with on­ly about $100 mil­lion in fund­ing un­til now. Dur­ing that time, Ja­cob Be­craft and Tasuku Ki­ta­da, the start­up’s founders, have ex­pe­ri­enced a roller coast­er of doubt and hype for mR­NA med­i­cines. More re­cent­ly, they've with­stood po­lit­i­cal as­saults on the tech­nol­o­gy as the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion de­fund­ed mR­NA vac­cine pro­grams just this week.

De­spite all of that, they’ve man­aged to pull off one of the largest rais­es for an mR­NA-fo­cused start­up in re­cent years. The new fund­ing was led by Swedish in­vestor Kin­nevik. Mul­ti­ple phar­ma com­pa­nies pitched in, in­clud­ing new in­vestors Re­gen­eron Ven­tures and Am­gen Ven­tures, and re­turn­ing in­vestor Eli Lil­ly.