TL;DR

The FDA approved Foundayo, Eli Lilly's brand name for orforglipron, on 1 April 2026 (Eli Lilly, April 2026). It is a once-daily oral GLP-1 pill you swallow, not an injection. In the ATTAIN-1 trial, people on the top dose lost about 12.4% of their body weight at 72 weeks. One thing to be clear about up front: this is a US approval only. Foundayo is not licensed by the MHRA, so you cannot get it in the UK yet.

What is Foundayo?

Foundayo is Eli Lilly's brand name for orforglipron, a once-daily GLP-1 receptor agonist that comes as a tablet. It is a small-molecule (non-peptide) drug, which is the technical reason it survives being swallowed. Most GLP-1 medicines are peptides that your gut would break down, so they have to be injected. Orforglipron does not, so it works as a pill.

It is a single GLP-1 agonist. That matters, because a lot of the early chatter online muddled it up with other drugs. Foundayo is not a dual agonist like Mounjaro, and it is not the triple agonist retatrutide. More on that below, because the mix-up is everywhere.

The short version:

• Once-daily oral tablet (not injected)
• Single GLP-1 receptor agonist
• Made by Eli Lilly
• FDA-approved 1 April 2026 for chronic weight management
• Not yet approved or available in the UK

How you take it

This is the part people on the injection will notice. Foundayo has no food or water rules (Drugs.com). You take it once a day, any time of day, with or without food. That is a real difference from the other GLP-1 pill on the scene, oral semaglutide, which has to be taken fasted first thing with strict timing.

You start low and step up. The tablet comes in 0.8, 2.5, 5.5, 9, 14.5 and 17.2 mg strengths, and the label has you begin at 0.8 mg and increase roughly every month, based on how you tolerate it, up to a maximum of 17.2 mg (FDA label). That slow ramp is the same idea behind titrating an injection: give your body time so the nausea is manageable.

How well it works

In the ATTAIN-1 trial, people on the top 17.2 mg dose who stayed on treatment lost about 12.4% of their body weight at 72 weeks, against roughly 0.9% on placebo (Lilly, ATTAIN-1). That is a genuinely useful result for a pill. It is not the 20%-plus figures you may have seen quoted, and if you did see those, they were almost certainly about a different drug.

For context, that puts orforglipron roughly in the range of the weekly Wegovy injection and a bit below tirzepatide (Mounjaro) at its top dose. Bear in mind these are separate trials with different patients, so it is a rough comparison, not a head-to-head.

Foundayo vs Mounjaro

The honest headline is that these are different tools. Mounjaro is a weekly injection and a dual agonist. Foundayo is a daily pill and a single agonist. Here is how they line up:

The dose numbers look wildly different, but you cannot read across them. A weekly 15 mg injection and a daily 17.2 mg pill are not the same amount of medicine reaching your blood. We get into why the mg figures mislead people in a separate guide on oral versus injectable doses.

Foundayo is not retatrutide

This is the one worth reading twice, because the internet keeps conflating them. Foundayo (orforglipron) and retatrutide are two completely different drugs.

• Foundayo / orforglipron: an oral, once-daily, single GLP-1 pill. Approved by the FDA in April 2026.
• Retatrutide: a weekly injectable triple agonist (GLP-1, GIP and glucagon), still in trials. It is not approved by the FDA, MHRA or anyone else, and it is the drug behind the eye-catching 20%-plus weight-loss numbers (Drugs.com).

If you want the detail on retatrutide, where it is in trials and how it stacks up against Mounjaro, we have a full piece on it: Retatrutide vs Mounjaro in the UK.

When will it reach the UK?

No firm date. The 1 April 2026 approval was the US FDA only. For the UK, Lilly still needs the MHRA to license it, and a submission is expected around the middle of 2026. Approval, if it comes, would take months after that, and NHS access would need a separate NICE appraisal on top. So realistically a UK launch is a 2027 conversation at the earliest, and private-only to begin with, the way new GLP-1s usually arrive here.

Anyone offering to sell you "Foundayo" in the UK right now is not selling you a licensed product. Be careful.

What UK readers can do now

If you are in the UK and you want a GLP-1, Foundayo is not one of your options yet. What you can actually access today, privately, is:

• Mounjaro or the Wegovy injection. Both are licensed and widely prescribed for weight management.
• The Wegovy pill (oral semaglutide 25 mg). The MHRA approved this in June 2026, the first GLP-1 tablet licensed in the UK (GOV.UK). It is private-only for now, not on the NHS. If a pill is what appeals to you, this is the one you can actually get. We cover it in our Wegovy pill guide.

The sensible move is to talk to a prescriber about what is licensed and right for you now, rather than waiting on a drug that has not landed here.

The Healthcount angle

When Foundayo does reach the UK, tracking it in Healthcount will be straightforward. It is a daily tablet, so you would log it like the other oral GLP-1s: a once-a-day dose in mg, with your titration steps recorded so you can see when you moved up and how your body reacted each time.

For now, if you are on Mounjaro, the Wegovy injection or the Wegovy pill, you can already track weight, doses, food and side effects in one place. That history is exactly what makes a future switch easier, because you have a record of what worked and what did not.

Curious about the oral GLP-1s? Log in to Healthcount and keep notes as the UK picture develops. We track what people ask about most.