Half-life
A drug's half-life is the time it takes for the amount of the drug in the blood to fall by half. A long half-life means the drug leaves the body slowly. Half-life describes how the body clears a medicine; it is not the same thing as how well the medicine works.
For experts
Elimination half-life is the time for plasma concentration to fall by 50% during the elimination phase. For semaglutide the approved US labelling reports an elimination half-life of approximately 1 week in patients with type 2 diabetes, attributed mainly to albumin binding. Half-life values are only meaningful for the species and route in which they were measured; the discovery paper reports 46.1 hours in mini-pigs after intravenous administration, which is animal data.
Sources (2)
- 01OZEMPIC (semaglutide) injection, solution - FDA-approved prescribing informationU.S. National Library of Medicine, DailyMed · 2026-06-10 · accessed 2026-09-29
- 02Discovery of the Once-Weekly Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) Analogue SemaglutideJournal of Medicinal Chemistry (indexed in PubMed, NCBI/NLM) · 2015-09-24 · accessed 2026-09-29