Shares of Eli Lilly are higher in premarket trading after the company unveiled blowout topline results for its next-generation obesity drug retatrutide, which delivered more than 23% weight loss over 68 weeks - the strongest performance yet for a late-stage obesity trial.
Adult patients in the Phase 3 TRIUMPH-4 trial testing retatrutide, a first-in-class GIP, GLP-1, and glucagon triple hormone receptor agonist, entered the study with obesity or overweight and knee osteoarthritis. Most participants had a BMI of 35 or higher.
Result highlights for both high-dose regimens (9 mg and 12 mg):
Met all primary and key secondary endpoints
Produced massive weight loss: up to 28.7% on average (71.2 lbs) at 68 weeks
Delivered major pain improvement: up to 4.5 points (75.8%) reduction on the WOMAC pain score
Improved physical function, in addition to weight and pain outcomes
"We are encouraged by the results of TRIUMPH-4, which highlight the powerful effect of retatrutide, a first-in-class triple agonist, on body weight, pain and physical function. With seven additional Phase 3 readouts expected in 2026, we believe retatrutide could become an important option for patients with significant weight loss needs and certain complications, including knee osteoarthritis," Kenneth Custer, Ph.D., executive vice president and president, Lilly Cardiometabolic Health, wrote in a statement.
Some patients lost so much weight they chose to exit the trial early, particularly those with a BMI below 35. The highest dose saw an 18% dropout rate due to side effects, including nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and occasional mild dysesthesia.
"Not all patients may need this potentially very high level of efficacy, and we believe retatrutide will likely be best suited for patients with a very high BMI, or with obesity-related complications that require a high degree of weight loss," Lilly's Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky told investors in October.
The results come as the race for next-generation obesity drugs intensifies: Shares of rival Novo Nordisk plummeted the most on record after an experimental GLP-1 fell short of Wall Street expectations last year. The drug CagriSema helped patients lose an average of 20.4% of their weight, far short of Novo's promise.
As the main opposition figurehead and rival to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, she's reportedly been in hiding for many months. María Corina Machadohasn't appeared in public for nearly a year, after she was briefly detained all the way back on Jan. 9 in Caracas.
Fearing another arrest where she could go away to prison for good, Machado has avoided public political or or protest events, even as her star was rising internationally with her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But there are reports she was safely whisked out of the country while Caracas authorities were distracted and preoccupied with Wednesday's US seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker.
After this, Machado popped up in Oslo, Norway - where she announced while appearing on a hotel balcony that many people had "risked their lives" to get her there. "I am very grateful to them, and this is a measure of what this recognition means to the Venezuelan people," she said. The purported details sound straight out of a Hollywood movie:
The Wall Street Journal, though, said she wore a wig and a disguise when she began her journey on Monday. First, she left her hideout in a Caracas suburb where she had been living for nearly a year, heading for a coastal fishing village.
Two people helped her flee. The trio passed 10 military checkpoints, avoiding capture each time, on a nerve-wracking 10-hour trip, before reaching the coast around midnight, the newspaper said. They then began a perilous trip across the open Caribbean Sea to Curacao in an open wooden fishing skiff.
According to the WSJ, the US military was informed of her crossing, to avoid the boat being targeted by airstrikes. Machado confirmed on Thursday that she had US support.
"Machado arrived in Curacao around 3:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday. She was met by a private contractor who specializes in extractions and was supplied by the Trump administration," according to the WSJ account.
Her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, had accepted the Nobel Prize in her place as she had missed the award ceremony - apparently by a mere hours. But Thursday's appearance can be thought of as her post-award press conference.
To be expected, she used the opportunity to again call for regime change in her own country, calling it a "criminal hub". She's calling on the international community to intervene and "cut those sources."
"The regime is using the resources — the cash flows that come from illegal activities, including the black market of oil — not to give food for hungry children, not for teachers who earn $1 a day, not to hospitals in Venezuela that do not have medicine or water, not for security. They use those resources to repress and persecute our people," she said.
And the mainstream media is fawning over her, with the NY Times hailing her as the "de facto spokeswoman for democracy in Venezuela." But given the US military is parked just off Venezuela's coast, this all seems less some kind of organic democratic uprising and much more obviously a brazen Washington orchestrated regime change op.
As an example of her own regime change rhetoric, geared toward the overthrow of President Maduro:
Reporter: Would you welcome a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela?
Machado:Venezuela has been already invaded. We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime.
She's of course giving the neocons and hawks what they want to hear, as this narrative of "Middle Easts terrorists" setting up shop in Venezuela has long been a talking point among Republicans especially. But evidence is thin to non-existent, and exists more in the imaginations of 24/7 Fox News consumers.
Machado also expressed support for the US military intercepting and seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, and sanctioning her country:
Mr. Maduro’s largest corporate partner is Chevron, the American energy company, which has continued to export Venezuelan oil to the United States despite Mr. Trump’s military escalation.
In response to questions about the seizure of the oil tanker, Ms. Machado said that she supported cutting the funds of Mr. Maduro’s government. She added that he finances himself with gold smuggling, human trafficking, drugs and illegal oil sales.
Just like the US-led regime change playbook says...
Machado outside her hotel in Oslo smiles while crowds chanted "President! President!" She declared, "I want you all back in Venezuela." She may soon get her wish in the country with the world's largest proven oil reserves.
Her daughter has promised that "she will be back in Venezuela very soon." Machado has said it is her "duty" to return to Venezuela with her Nobel award, and she's willing to do so whether or not Maduro remains in power.
Meanwhile, there has actually been some local opposition to the oppositionist evident on the streets of Norway...
Indeed many are not buying this carefully curated narrative: “We know that our regime is supporting itself thanks to other authoritarian regimes. We need the support of all democracies in the world," Machado said. "That’s why we are certainly asking the world to act." Iraq, Libya, Syria 2.0 coming?
Adding to the growing mountain of commentators joining us in calling BS on the booming data center industry magically pulling dozens of gigawatts of energy per year out of thin air...
... and as a reminder, the DOE recently forecast that data centers would need 100GW of new peak capacity by 2030 - the equivalent of about 100 new nuclear power plants - the FT has published a report highlighting the growing chasm between dreams and (artificial) reality.
Already accounting for about 51 GW of demand today, data centers look to add as much as 72 GW over just the next three years according to Morgan Stanley. There's about 25 GW of new energy generation ready to come online in that same timeframe, mostly in the form of natural gas turbines, but this will leave a gaping hole 47 GW wide. It follows similar estimates from across the industry.
An AP1000 from Cameco’s Westinghouse can provide just over 1.1 GW, which means from the perspective of nuclear energy, big tech is asking for over 17 new large reactors within the next 36 months. So, just some context: in the past few decades, the US has built only two, and they weren't exactly cheap.
Oh, and as of this moment, the US isn't building any, while China has 29 in process.
Needless to say, the US is horribly behind with construction proficiency of any type of energy generation infrastructure. OpenAI’s letter to the US government claimed they and their big tech peers need 100 GW per year of new power, while lamenting the US only added 51 GW in 2024 compared to China adding 429 GW. This is partly due to China’s skilled and proficient construction force.
But what happened to the army of nuclear construction workers trained for the reactors we built recently in Georgia, you ask? They quit nuclear to go build data centers... the same data centers which now have no power. As the chart from Goldman below indicates, the US is now short 300,000 engineers (and as much as 500,000) to meet US power demands by 2030.
With the average time for connecting new demand to grids like PJM now exceeding eight years, where is all the power going to come from in the short term?
Why don't we just take a supersonic jet engine and screw it into the ground? Thankfully, there's a company for that.
Boom Supersonic has unveiled their Superpower Natural Gas Turbine, capable of producing 42 MW of electricity each. The company was originally designing a supersonic jet turbine for use on next-gen airliners, but they quickly recognized the disturbing demand for new energy generation capacity and are now seizing their moment.
Furthermore, Boom turbines have the benefit of not requiring water cooling systems due to their advanced materials used in the turbine’s construction and specially designed air cooling systems. Given the strong opposition to water usage by environmental groups and smaller towns, this gives Boom a major leg up in dry areas.
Their capacity for producing the supersonic turbines is expected to reach roughly 100 per year by 2030, which is about 4 GW of new gas turbine energy. So no, it won't plug the demand gap through 2030 - and it certainly won't plug the massive gap with China - but at least it's a step in the right direction. As for the bigger picture, either more gas turbine producers will need to step up over these next few critical years, or data centers are going to start stacking up as nothing more than order dots on GE Vernova’s backlog.
Meanwhile Boom's core business - the pursuit of a 21st century Concorde - continues.
