The future of weight loss treatment is looking to get easier to swallow. Several research teams and pharmaceutical companies are developing promising GLP-1-based drugs that come in a pill rather than an injection. Just this month alone, two separate teams published Phase II trial data on their oral GLP-1 candidates. These drugs, called aleniglipron and elecoglipron, appeared to deliver weight loss outcomes comparable to existing options. Still other pill-based candidates are coming along in the pipeline. Small molecule GLP-1s GLP-1 is a peptide hormone that helps regulate our hunger; GLP-1 drugs (formally known as receptor agonists) mimic this hormone to help people lose weight in various ways, such as by reducing people’s food cravings. Currently, GLP-1s and similar hormone-based weight loss drugs are typically taken as a weekly subcutaneous injection, and historically, it’s proven difficult to create effective pill versions of them. Synthetic GLP-1 mimics like semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy) are big peptide molecules, and when digested as a pill, barely any of the drug can reach the bloodstream since the molecules are easily broken down by our stomach acid.