There is this number that keeps getting thrown around, and that is that this is going to be a $150 billion annual market.

Now, I feel that it's one of those numbers that's become kind of thoughtless and is not really getting reexamined.

A lot of assumptions go into that about how widely these are covered by insurance, about how long people end up staying on some of these drugs, and

a number of other factors. If you assume that Lily and Novo Nordis continue to dominate

the market, and you assume it really does go to $150 billion, well, you know, Lily starts

to grow into that valuation and they start to look pretty reasonable just a few years out.

I'm Mary Long, and that's Motley Fool analyst Carl Teal. Weight loss drugs like Ozympic and Manjaro have dominated the new cycle for the past couple of years now.

But other GLP1 drugs have been on the market for the past two decades.

Still, the more recent growth of these drugs has a lot of investors very optimistic.

And there are other opportunities in this market beyond injections that are currently under development.

My colleague, Ricky Mulvey, caught up with Carl to check in on the state of weight loss drugs

and the science behind them. They also discuss the material differences between key versions

of different weight loss drugs, concerns about side effects and the role of telehealth in prescribing

GLP ones, plus how retail

investors ought to approach this still growing space.

One of the great societal shifts of the past decade, and I would say into the next decade, is the introduction of weight loss drugs. They've driven sales growth for big pharma companies,

including Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. For example, this past year, the sales of obesity care products for

Novo rose by more than 50 percent, and Eli Lilly's Manjaro rose by 60 percent right now,

an estimated one in 20 American adults are on weight loss drugs. Carl, as we get started,

that's the number salad, but what do you make of all of these results in the exploding popularity of GLP1 drugs? It's remarkable, but there's kind of a lot of

subtlety behind those numbers that you just talked about. And I'm sure we'll get further into it.

But one right off the bat is that you mentioned one in 20 people being on these drugs.

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