Chair & CEO @EliLillyandCo. Building on 150 years of advancing human health by delivering breakthrough medicines and expanding access worldwide.
Indianapolis, Indiana
- Tweets 41
- Following 219
- Followers 8,839
- Likes 56
Well said Vas. AI will help us conquer disease, but this will take time, effort and lots and lots of data that doesn’t exist, yet. I would add that robotic labs will begin to make scaling data more tractable. lnkd.in/p/g8qvP5qX
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One month (or so) on @X , a platform unlike any other. Energy, speed, smarts and stupidity.
-The best thing in BioX - Rapid and divergent takes on new clinical data, on balance usually right..wisdom of crowds
-The worst thing on BioX - Shameless replies and reposts pumping your own book, praying for M&A about your favorite name, plane stalking…do people actually think this is how a real drug company or serious investor makes decisions? Maybe it just makes you feel like you have some agency, then ok.
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Two souls are dead because they self administered something purporting to be the most powerful metabolic agent ever developed - without medical supervision, before the inventor has asked for approval and sourced from a Chinese “lab” seeking to make a quick buck.
Peptide World - “Lilly made this up”.
Two deaths were reported to the FDA from research-grade retatrutide (illegal for human use). cbsnews.com/news/deaths-repo…
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
We are living in the Dark Ages of Drug Regulation and Enforcement.
At this point, make every drug OTC and get rid of drug patents. None of it seems to matter anymore. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
If someone miraculously invented a drug that:
- successfully reversed obesity and most of its associated diseases
- improved longevity
- decreased the long term health costs
….and it was NOT covered by health insurance, ….
- then what would be the use of health insurance?
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No question that @IsomorphicLabs and other AI drug discovery initiatives can radically accelerate the process, which today is ridiculously protracted. But the objective or expectation of finding "cures" for all diseases is unrealistic IMHO, no matter how much capital is invested.
Good summary of today's news @grok
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Adam the contrast was the point. Two different bad/fatal diseases yet very different response from the field to advances. We do not have a functional cure for many cancers but HR < .7 in any cancer is described as practice changing in oncology. Neurology seems underwhelmed by the same degree in disease change.
Of course cancer is not one thing and I could have been more precise- CLL is not good but now mostly not fatal, due to many advances from Lilly and our peers HR+ HER - breast cancer has long survival now yet GI cancers are mostly unsolved and survival curves are terrible.
You know what else is terrible? Almost every neuro-degenerative disease including AD and we (including the media) need to discuss it that way. Unfortunately I’ve witnessed end of life journeys up close in both diseases, while different horrors present themselves in each I’d say they are both pretty bad. Advancement 30%+ at a time should change practice and routinely be offered to patients and families. Oncology does this Neurology doesn’t.
$LLY Kisunla is an Alzheimer's drug. It's not a cancer drug. Different diseases, different trajectories, different patient population with different needs, different benefit-risk profile.
@DaveARicks, speaking to @bradloncar, points to the hazard ratio from Kisunla's Phase 3 studies and says, "If this was a cancer drug, it would be a giant drug!"
Ok, but it's not.
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
But AZ and REGN are not R&D underachievers. (With REGN this is largely lack of a new catalyst and worries about the Eylea franchise, I assume.)
And there is certainly a lot of market cap gained and destroyed on bubbles, with the genomics bubble of the early 2000s, which inflated big pharma stocks, as a great example. (Actual value created was minimal.)
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
If you’re selling longevity, show me the evidence behind the treatment.
I like seeing major hospitals get into this field. There’s exciting science here, and they have an opportunity to help establish what actually works.
But a compelling theory about aging is only the starting point. Has the treatment been studied in people? Did it improve their health? How meaningful was the benefit, and what were the risks?
We don’t need every answer before we explore something new. We do need to be clear about the difference between a promising idea and a proven benefit.
Anyone offering a longevity treatment should explain what the data actually show and what remains unproven. People deserve to know.
What can hospital longevity clinics can tell you about your health? STAT's Sarah Todd went to one to find out. trib.al/p9amvw8
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Simple and accurate from WAPO🤌. No examples here from health care which remains one of the most price controlled sectors on the planet. Imagine a world where we unleashed investment and innovation in healthcare products and services and its impact on the quantity and quality of human life.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
The heart deserves as much attention as blood sugar in type 2 diabetes. In our largest, longest study of an oral GLP-1, presented at #EASD2026, the trial met its cardiovascular safety endpoint vs. insulin glargine. Read more: go.lilly.com/cmojxu
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
Presented at #EASD2026, our investigational combination of a selective amylin agonist and GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonist showed promising results in adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes: substantial weight loss and A1C reduction. Read more: go.lilly.com/j8vyoc
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
Wouldn’t there be a high incentive in stealthily providing additional weight loss promoters such as better lifestyle advice to the single arm? Also, AE comparison much more difficult with single arm.
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Certainly its becoming less practical, and much less informative, to try to compare novel therapy to something below the best standard of care. Drop in rates of GLP-1 and the rising attrition rates in placebo confound effect sizes, make studies less interpretable and demonstrate patient need. Since the approved molecules are now abundant, should be standard of care for obesity management, and increasingly reimbursed - your point is a good one.
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In the phase 3 TRIUMPH-1 trial involving patients with obesity, retatrutide, a triple hormone receptor agonist, resulted in substantial weight reduction and a decrease in knee osteoarthritis pain and obstructive sleep apnea events. Full trial results: nej.md/4ycgSHz
ALT A graph from an Original Article published in the New England Journal of Medicine article titled "Retatrutide, a Triple Hormone Receptor Agonist, for Treatment of Obesity." The graph shows effect of retatrutide on body weight. The trial name, TRIUMPH-1, is in parentheses after the title. The NEJM identity sits at the bottom.
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Well I should have added a few more critical questions to this list
-Peer reviewed and presented at a medical meeting or published in a journal >>> pre print + press release while a meeting is going on
- For post hoc or RWE publish your methods and caveats, your sample and absolute event rates and measures - better to have it verified by independent group - real science is transparent and can be replicated.
EASD in 2 weeks! A lot of weight-loss numbers are about to drop..including 3 major studies from @EliLillyandCo.
Before we understand a molecule’s performance we need to understand design choices that move a topline weight loss number:
- Baseline & mix. BMI, diabetes status, sex and ethnicity all shift observed response
-Stats methods. Treatment-policy and efficacy estimands answer different questions and trial drop out matters for real world outcomes. Mixing them is not appropriate.
- Uncontrolled tails. Open-label extensions and crossovers can keep weight falling after randomization ends. That is not a new efficacy estimate.
- Execution. Lifestyle intensity, titration schedule, time at maintenance dose, and placebo-arm drop-in of approved medicines (important new trend..see ADA survo data).
Head-to-head data settle all this and should be much more widely used in the future. Where they don't exist, an indirect comparison is one data point — anchored, covariate-adjusted, prespecified, assumptions stated.
Those rules apply to our work too. Hold us to them.
Methods first. Then the number.
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Obesity and its consequences is a global scourge.and 4 of 7 who suffer live in low and middle income countries. In the past we all expected it to take decades to reach these nations and people. Lilly has the medicines, the pipeline and the resources to make this better. Today we change the course- we will research, register, launch and partner to reach 10s of million more people.
Our goal: improve access to quality healthcare for 30M people living in resource-limited settings annually by 2030—and we’ve met it five years early. Today we launch Lilly Change the Course Commitment, aiming to bridge the gap in diabetes and obesity care in those areas. go.lilly.com/e6kbej
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Dave A Ricks retweeted
In Milan, Italy, we're opening House of Lilly during #EASD2026. It brings art and science together to share our history, the inspiration behind our innovation and the science behind what comes next as we work to change the course of cardiometabolic health.
#WeAreLilly
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