The GLP-1 Pipeline: Every Molecule, and How Far Along It Is

How to read a phase

Phase is the single most useful fact about a drug you cannot yet buy, and it is routinely reported as though it were a ranking of promise. It is not. It is a statement about how much has been tested and on how many people.

• Phase 1 establishes whether a dose is tolerable, usually in fewer than a hundred people. Weight-loss numbers from Phase 1 are real measurements of very small groups, and they move a great deal when the group gets larger.
• Phase 2 establishes whether the drug works and at what dose. This is where most failures happen, and where the headline percentages that circulate online usually come from.
• Phase 3 is the final stage before a filing: large, long, and designed to be the evidence a regulator reads. A Phase 3 result is the first number worth comparing to an approved drug's label, and even then not directly.
• Phase 4 means the drug is already approved somewhere and is being studied after launch. Mazdutide is in this category because it is approved in China, which is easy to miss when it is filed under "upcoming".

None of this predicts approval. Drugs fail in Phase 3, and the two entries at the bottom of the table reached late stages and stopped anyway.

Three mechanisms, and why one of them is not a GLP-1

The molecules here fall into families, and the family explains most of what separates them.

Single GLP-1 agonists activate one receptor. This is semaglutide, and it is the class the whole field started from. The remaining work in this family is about delivery rather than the target: swallowing it instead of injecting it, or giving more of it. Foundayo is a small molecule you can take as a tablet, which matters because peptides normally cannot survive the stomach.

Dual and triple agonists add receptors. Tirzepatide added GIP and produced more weight loss than semaglutide in the only head-to-head trial of the two. The obvious next step was to add a third, and that is retatrutide: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon together. Glucagon is the counter-intuitive one, since it raises blood sugar in isolation, but it also increases energy expenditure, which is why it appears in survodutide and pemvidutide as well. We unpack the dual mechanism in how tirzepatide works.

Amylin analogues are a different hormone entirely. Cagrilintide, eloralintide and petrelintide are not GLP-1 drugs and do not act on the GLP-1 receptor. Amylin is co-secreted with insulin and works on satiety through its own pathway. They are tracked here because they are being developed for the same purpose, frequently in combination with a GLP-1 — CagriSema is cagrilintide plus semaglutide, and eloralintide is being studied alongside tirzepatide. Calling them GLP-1 drugs, which is common, is simply wrong.

Three entries that do not survive checking

Every row in the table above was verified by querying ClinicalTrials.gov for the molecule as an intervention and reading the maximum phase, lead sponsor and study status. That pass contradicted three things that circulate widely in lists of upcoming weight-loss drugs.

Efpeglenatide is not upcoming. It reached Phase 3 and Sanofi terminated the programme. It still appears on opportunity lists as a medium-priority drug to watch. There is nothing to watch.

Amycretin has one registered study. It is frequently ranked alongside retatrutide and CT-388 on the strength of early results, and its mechanism is genuinely interesting — a GLP-1 and amylin co-agonist in a single molecule. But one Phase 1 programme is the thinnest evidence base of anything in this table, and it should be read that way.

ASC37 does not appear to exist. It shows up on at least one circulated watchlist. A search of the registry returns nothing. The intended molecule may be ASC30, an oral GLP-1 candidate, but we are not going to list a compound we cannot verify.

Two more corrections in the other direction, since the same lists undersell as well as oversell. CT-388 and eloralintide are routinely described as early-stage or "blue ocean". Both are in Phase 3 and recruiting, at Roche and Eli Lilly. And retatrutide, sometimes still described as a Phase 2 molecule, has thirty-three registered studies with Phase 3 among them.

What you can actually get

Two of the fourteen are approved and dispensed in the US: Foundayo, the first oral small-molecule GLP-1, and Wegovy HD, a 7.2 mg presentation of semaglutide. For those two there is an FDA label, which means dosing, administration and adverse reactions are documented facts rather than inferences from a press release.

For everything else in the table, there is no approved dose. That is not a technicality. It is the whole difference between a drug and a research chemical, and it is where the honest answer to "how do I get retatrutide" begins.

The part of this market that is not a market

Retatrutide, in particular, is sold online today by sellers describing it as a research peptide. It is not approved anywhere, no regulator has assessed how it is made, and the FDA has been naming the companies distributing it. What arrives has not been verified to be the molecule, at the stated concentration, in a sterile preparation.

This is also why you will not find a dosing schedule for any unapproved molecule on this site. There is no approved dose to publish, so anything printed would be reconstructed from trial protocols — and the practical effect of publishing it would be to supply instructions for the grey-market product. Our position on that market, and what the FDA databases actually show, is in can you buy retatrutide.

If the effect is what you are after and you want it from a product that has been through the process, the approved options are covered in FDA-approved GLP-1 medications and compared in the best GLP-1 for weight loss.

What would change this page

A tracker is only worth reading if it is maintained, so it is worth saying what maintenance means here. Each entry changes when one of four things happens: a trial reads out and moves the phase, a regulator approves or rejects a filing, a sponsor halts a programme, or a molecule receives a nonproprietary name and starts being searched under it — which is why CT-388 and enicepatide both appear above.

The verification date on the table is the last time every row was checked against the registry, not the last time the page was edited. When those diverge, the date shown is the older one.

Key takeaways

• Fourteen molecules, from two already dispensed in the US to one with a single Phase 1 study.
• Phase describes how much has been tested, not how promising a drug is. Late-stage programmes still fail — two in this table did.
• Cagrilintide, eloralintide and petrelintide are amylin analogues, not GLP-1 drugs, though they are developed for the same purpose and often combined with one.
• Efpeglenatide is terminated, amycretin has one registered study, and ASC37 could not be verified to exist — all three appear on circulating lists of drugs to watch.
• CT-388 and eloralintide are Phase 3 and recruiting, not early-stage.
• Only the approved entries have a dose anyone should follow. For the rest, what is sold online is not the drug that is being trialled.