The first new prescription diet pill in 13 years won approval from the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday, providing a new option for the roughly one-third of U.S. adults considered obese.
The drug, developed by Arena Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, has been known as lorcaserin and will be sold under the name Belviq by the U.S. branch of the Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai.
Doctors who treat obesity, and some patient advocates, have argued that there is a need for medicines to help people lose weight, something to plug a “treatment gap” between diet and exercise, which do not work for many people, and the more radical option of bariatric surgery.
Before Belviq’s approval, there was only one prescription medicine — Roche’s Xenical — approved for long-term use in weight loss.
The history of diet pills has been marked by many safety problems, which has made the FDA reluctant to approve new drugs. Belviq itself was turned down by the agency in 2010, but Arena came back with new data that assuaged some of the agency’s safety concerns.
Arena said it was not clear yet when the drug would be available and what it would cost.
Belviq provides only modest weight loss, leading to some debate among investors and analysts as to how well the drug will sell.
In clinical trials, those who took the drug lost an average of about 6 percent of their weight after a year, meaning a person weighing 220 pounds would weigh 206 pounds after a year.
