With two "potential drug kings" in hand, Eli Lilly aims to become the first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company!

After achieving a market value target of $500 billion, Eli Lilly hopes to become the world's first trillion-dollar pharmaceutical company with its Alzheimer's and weight loss drugs.

Last Friday, American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly closed at $521.34, with a market value of $501.482 billion, surpassing Johnson & Johnson and UnitedHealth to become the world's highest-valued pharmaceutical and healthcare company.

In the past 12 months, Eli Lilly's stock price has increased by nearly 70%, reaching a historic high. The main driving forces behind this are two key drugs: donanemab for Alzheimer's disease and tirzepatide for weight loss.

Last month, Eli Lilly announced that the results of Phase 3 clinical trials for donanemab, a drug developed by the company to treat Alzheimer's disease, showed that it can slow down the rate of cognitive decline in patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's by 35%.

Eli Lilly stated that it has submitted an application for donanemab to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and it is expected that the FDA will make a decision before the end of the year.

In addition, lecanemab, another Alzheimer's antibody drug developed by Eli Lilly's competitors, U.S. biotechnology company Biogen and Japanese company Eisai, has received full approval from the FDA this month.

Alzheimer's experts believe that donanemab and lecanemab could be milestones in the treatment of dementia.

On the other hand, Eli Lilly's "miracle weight loss drug" tirzepatide has also excited investors.

Tirzepatide is a dual-target (GIP/GLP-1) receptor agonist developed by Eli Lilly. It reduces patients' appetite and increases energy consumption, leading to weight loss.

The results of Phase 3 clinical trials showed that patients taking a low dose of tirzepatide experienced an average weight loss of 15%, while those taking a high dose experienced an average weight loss of 22.5%.

In the recently released Q2 report, tirzepatide's sales shocked the market, making it the fastest-growing drug in history.

In the first half of this year, tirzepatide's sales reached $1.55 billion, with Q2 sales alone reaching $980 million, a MoM growth of 72%. Eli Lilly even raised its full-year sales forecast for tirzepatide to $4 billion.

Since its approval, tirzepatide's sales have almost doubled every quarter for the past five quarters, and this is only with the indication of diabetes. In contrast, the sales of semaglutide, another acclaimed "miracle weight loss drug," in its fifth quarter on the market amounted to only $150 million. Despite the high demand causing a certain degree of shortage of Teripotide, Lilly has expressed its intention to continue expanding production capacity.

After reaching a market value of $500 billion last week, Daniel Skovronsky, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer of Lilly, told the Financial Times that Lilly plans to launch over 20 new drugs in the next decade to sustain its growth and aims to become the first healthcare company with a market value of $1 trillion:

Having good drugs is not enough, we need some great drugs that can change the history of medicine. In fact, it is somewhat surprising that there has not been a healthcare company with a market value of $1 trillion so far. I hope we can achieve this goal.

In addition to Alzheimer's disease and obesity, he also mentioned that Lilly hopes to expand its pipeline in the field of oncology and develop drugs for the treatment of chronic pain and other diseases.