‘Kiwi Ozempic’ finds favour in clinical trial; dieting experts still advise caution
Tuesday, 21 July 2026
A $2 million investment in human trials of a natural New Zealand-developed appetite suppressant has been published, and it could indicate Ozempic and Wegovy could have a new Kiwi competitor that doesn’t need a doctor to prescribe it.
On Monday, Calocurb published details of a six-month, 150-person trial of its non-prescription appetite-suppressant capsules containing a compound derived from a bitter hops extract discovered by government scientists.
The capsules are sold as stimulating the body’s production of an appetite-suppressing hormone, while Wegovy and Ozempic are medicines that mimic the hormone.
Half the people in the trial were given Calocurb capsules, with the other half getting placebo pills, the company said.
Read more:
Kiwi companies bid for cash to take on Ozempic, Ziplock and Stratocaster
These big-thinking Kiwi entrepreneurs are a tonic for the miserable economy
After six months, the average weight loss for those taking the Calocurb pills was 3.77kg without loss of muscle mass, compared to 0.4kg lost by those on the placebo, Calocurb said.
Founder Sarah Kennedy said: “When I first saw the results I was absolutely and utterly blown away.”
Expert on the “weight anxiety industry” Andrew Dickson, from the University of Otago Business School, was sceptical about Calocurb, and cautioned people on being too credulous of a study they read about in the media before it had been critiqued widely by experts.
The results of the 150-person trial were known in some circles before the publication in a US journal, as Calocurb’s Louise Cunningham teased them when raising expansion capital for Calocurb in May at the Icehouse Ventures Demo Day event in Parnell in Auckland.
But the angel investors attending, and the handful of media, were sworn not to repeat it outside the event.
The capital-raise for US$10 million was oversubscribed, said Kennedy.
Research on the dieting and weight loss industry presents a mixed picture, but it shows that while dieting, and weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, can help people lose weight, a large proportion of people who lose weight through them, subsequently put weight back on.
A study by researchers at the University of Cambridge in England, for example, found that year after stopping taking the drugs, people regained on average 60% of their lost weight within a year.
The companies which own the two most famous injectable weight-loss drugs, which are noted for side effects like nausea and muscle loss, spent hundreds of millions on marketing them to the roughly one billion obese people worldwide, including hospitality events for more than 260,000 doctors.
Calocurb won’t have that kind of budget to market its capsules in the US and Europe, where it has patents pending, and nor would it have an army of doctors prepped to prescribe it.
But Kennedy, who established Calocurb in 2018, believed the small New Zealand start-up had a couple of aces up its sleeve.
One was that the side effects of Calocurb were lower than those of Wegovy and Ozempic. And secondly, she said: “The conversation now is turning not just to weight loss. It’s turning to body composition.”
That was because up to 40% of weight lost by people using Wegovy and Ozempic was muscle, she said.
The results from the 150-person pilot showed that was not the case for the 75 people who took Calocurb in the trial.
“Ours was all fat, no muscle,” says Kennedy.
There was no research study on weight regain among people who stop using Calocurb to match that done by the University of Cambridge researchers on Wegovy and Ozempic.
Kennedy said a check-in three months after the 75 people in the trial had stopped using it showed they had continued to lose weight.
“I’m probably not supposed to talk about it, but the ones in the treatment group continued to lose weight, not at the same accelerated rate, but they continued to lose weight, so they didn’t put weight on,” she said.
“We actually think about it like we’re rebooting your gut-brain access,” she said.
The weights of the people in the study would not continue to be tracked.
She acknowledged that people buying Calocurb would often stop buying it, and then later return, though she said some used it strategically, for example to suppress their appetites while in a food-rich environment, like a cruise ship.
Dickson said Wegovy and Ozempic had been shown to be effective, and for the first time since the obesity epidemic began in the 1970s, the obesity rate in the US had ticked down.
Part of their effectiveness appeared to be in the the silencing of “food noise”, which can be defined as the constant thinking and obsessing about food; what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat.
The two drugs had also had a positive impact on many KiwiSaver funds which invest in Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which own Wegovy and Ozempic respectively.
Dickson thought it was unlikely that Calocurb would have a societally significant impact in New Zealand, even if its claims stacked up in the long-term.
Obesity mapped closely to poverty in New Zealand, and they would not be able to afford the roughly $1400-a-year to Calocurb capsules, which can be bought off the shelf at Chemist Warehouse for $84.99 for a bottle of 90 capsules.
“It’s not the thing poor people are going to be using. We are playing in the ‘worried well’ space,” he says.
The cost was, however, far lower than the roughly $6000-a-year cost of Wegovy and Ozempic.
But it is not only Ozempic and Wegovy that Calocurb would have to compete with, Dickson says, as a new generation of weight loss drugs are under development from well-resourced international drugs companies.