TRIUMPH,
mapped.

What TRIUMPH is

TRIUMPH is the name Eli Lilly put on the phase 3 program for retatrutide, and it is not one study. The public registry at clinicaltrials.gov lists nine numbered TRIUMPH trials plus several unbranded phase 3 studies running beside them, each built to support a different claim a regulator would have to accept. Read one at a time they look slow. Read together they explain why the answer on our approval tracker has not moved: not approved, not purchasable, still being tested.

Everything below comes from the registry entries themselves. Statuses and enrollment numbers are what the sponsor has posted. Timing is given as a window rather than a date, because registry completion dates shift and anyone quoting you a launch quarter is guessing.

The obesity core

TRIUMPH-1 is the master protocol in adults with obesity or overweight who do not have type 2 diabetes, with more than 2,300 participants. The registry marks it completed, with primary completion reached earlier this year. Its condition list also names knee osteoarthritis and obstructive sleep apnea, because sub-studies for those groups sit inside the same protocol. TRIUMPH-2 is the mirror image in adults who do have type 2 diabetes along with obesity or overweight, roughly 1,150 participants, also completed this year and also carrying a sleep apnea condition.

These two carry the central weight loss claim. Whatever number they produce becomes the figure that replaces the 24.2 percent phase 2 result in every headline, and the one a reviewer will weigh against tirzepatide at 20.9 percent and semaglutide at 14.9 percent. The full evidence picture, including what phase 2 did and did not settle, sits in the retatrutide guide.

The comorbidity arms

TRIUMPH-3 enrolled close to 1,950 adults with severe obesity and established cardiovascular disease, and the registry lists it as completed this spring. TRIUMPH-4 was the smallest and the first to finish: 445 participants with obesity and osteoarthritis of the knee, completed in late 2025. TRIUMPH-7 runs the same idea in obesity with chronic low back pain, 586 participants, active but no longer recruiting, with primary completion posted for 2027.

The purpose of these studies is label language. A drug that only reduces weight is prescribed one way. A drug shown to move knee pain, sleep apnea severity or back pain in people with obesity is argued for differently by physicians and paid for differently by insurers. That is the practical reason a company runs a small osteoarthritis trial alongside a 2,300 person obesity trial.

The head to head

TRIUMPH-5 compares retatrutide directly against tirzepatide in 800 adults with obesity. It is active and no longer recruiting, with primary completion listed for late 2026. This is the study clinicians want most, because everything else in this class has been compared across trials rather than inside one. A cross-trial comparison of 24.2 against 20.9 percent is a talking point. A randomized head to head is evidence, and it is also the only way to learn what the third receptor costs in side effects when the comparison is fair.

Maintenance and dosing

Three more numbered studies exist to answer the questions that arrive after the headline. TRIUMPH-6 tests retatrutide for maintaining weight reduction in 643 adults and runs into 2028. TRIUMPH-8 is a smaller phase 3b study of 250 participants with obesity or overweight and no type 2 diabetes, with primary completion in 2027. TRIUMPH-9 compares different dose escalation schemes in 600 participants and runs to late 2028, which is the trial equivalent of admitting that nausea is the reason people quit this drug class and that how fast you climb matters.

The outcomes trial

The largest study in the program does not carry the TRIUMPH brand at all. It is an event-driven cardiovascular and kidney outcomes trial in 10,000 adults, active and no longer recruiting, with primary completion posted toward the end of the decade. Event-driven means it does not end on a calendar date, it ends when enough heart and kidney events have occurred to answer the question. Nothing else in the program can produce a claim that retatrutide prevents events rather than reduces weight, and nothing else takes as long.

Diabetes and liver

Alongside the numbered trials sit several unbranded phase 3 studies in type 2 diabetes: a 1,250 person comparison against semaglutide with primary completion around now, a 320 person placebo-controlled study in diabetes with moderate or severe renal impairment finishing later this year, and a completed placebo-controlled study of 537 participants. Separately, a large master protocol in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease is actively recruiting with retatrutide as one of its arms, 4,500 participants across more than 500 sites. That liver study is the main place a person in the United States could still enroll on retatrutide today.

Readout is not approval

This is the part vendors blur. A completed trial produces a result. A result becomes a conference presentation and a journal paper. Only a full marketing application, filed and then reviewed, produces an approval, and that review runs many months after the filing. Completed studies in the registry are therefore a real milestone and not a countdown. As of today no submission has been announced, so the gap between the best trial data in the field and a prescription anyone can fill remains total.

Until it closes, the medicines that exist are the ones a physician can actually write for, compared honestly in our weight loss guide. Every vial sold online as retatrutide in the meantime is an unregulated research chemical, whatever the seller has printed on it.

What we watch

Three things would change this page: the first TRIUMPH-1 and TRIUMPH-2 results in print, the head to head against tirzepatide, and any announced regulatory filing. Each lands in the tracker the week it happens.

Follow the live approval tracker