Zealand Pharma and its partner Roche announced on September 29, 2026 that complete results from the Phase 2 ZUPREME-1 trial of petrelintide, an investigational amylin analog for weight management, have been published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. The companies also presented additional data from the trial at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Milan.

What the Trial Tested

ZUPREME-1 was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 study that enrolled 485 adults with overweight or obesity (mean age 47, mean BMI 36.7 kg/m²) across 32 sites in the United States, Poland, and Romania. Participants received once-weekly injections of petrelintide across a dose range of 1.0 to 9.0 mg, or placebo, for 42 weeks, alongside standard diet and exercise counseling.

What the Published Data Show

According to the peer-reviewed results, petrelintide produced mean body weight reductions of up to 10.7% from baseline by week 42, compared with 1.7% for placebo, using the trial's efficacy estimand. Participants on the higher doses also saw larger reductions in waist circumference (up to 10.8 cm versus 4.3 cm for placebo), C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation, down 41% versus 6%), and triglycerides (down 21% versus 9%). Gastrointestinal side effects, the most common adverse events with this drug class, were reported as mild and similar in frequency to placebo, with no vomiting or treatment discontinuations reported at the dose researchers identified as maximally effective.

Why Amylin Analogs Are Being Watched Closely

Petrelintide works differently than the GLP-1 receptor agonists that currently dominate the weight-loss drug market. It's an analog of amylin, a hormone the pancreas releases alongside insulin that helps regulate appetite and the rate food leaves the stomach. Because amylin analogs act through a different receptor pathway than semaglutide or tirzepatide, researchers are studying whether they can match GLP-1 efficacy with a more favorable gastrointestinal side-effect profile, and whether combining the two mechanisms (as Novo Nordisk has done with cagrilintide and semaglutide in CagriSema) can improve on either approach alone.

Regulatory Status

Petrelintide is not FDA-approved and remains investigational. Following the Phase 2 program, Zealand Pharma and Roche have moved into a global Phase 3 registrational program, which this site covered when it was first announced. A Lancet publication and a major conference presentation are markers of scientific credibility and typically precede a company's eventual new drug application, but they are not themselves a regulatory filing, and Phase 3 trials, which enroll far larger and more diverse patient populations over longer periods, still need to confirm both the effect size and the safety profile seen here.

The Bottom Line

This is a genuine expansion of the public evidence base for petrelintide, not a new efficacy claim: the topline 10.7% weight-loss figure was previously disclosed by the companies, but the full peer-reviewed dataset, including the inflammatory and metabolic markers and the detailed tolerability data, is now available for independent scientific scrutiny for the first time. That matters because peer review and full-data publication, discussed in more detail in this site's guide to what peer review does and doesn't guarantee, allow outside researchers to evaluate a trial's methodology rather than relying on a company's own press release.