2024-09-05 08:00:06
The battle for anti-obesity drugs between Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and the US’ Eli Lilly is accelerating. In November 2023, the Indianapolis laboratory’s weight loss drug Zepbound received approval for marketing in the United States. The latter became a direct competitor to Novo Nordisk’s best-selling product Wegovy (originally called Ozempic). The pressure between the two rivals is increasing and they are evenly matched.
It is not the first time that the two have met face to face. A century ago, the advent of insulin was a revolution in diabetes treatment that had already opened up fronts between manufacturers. A hundred years later, fortunes continue to be made in diabetes, but it is in another area, that of obesity, that the two organizations are stepping up their efforts thanks to a new generation of promising treatments.
In June 2021, Novo Nordisk debuted in Wegovy’s place, comfortably ahead of its rival. Within three years, the laboratory has earned more than 8 billion euros from its treatments. This is a rather rare performance in the pharmaceutical industry. It took only five weeks for the Danish new star to reach the sales level that its predecessor Saxenda, another weight loss drug that Novo Nordisk has had on the market since 2014, took four years to achieve.
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However, Eli Lilly will not enter the race until the end of 2023, but it will easily find its place as anti-obesity drugs are in high demand. Especially since it has one major advantage: greater average weight loss than its competitors. In the second quarter, Zepbound had sales of $1.24 billion (€1.1 billion), while Novo’s product turnover was DKK 11.7 billion (€1.6 billion).
But the pharmaceutical group does not intend to take a back seat. In order to further increase orders, the American company announced on August 27 the launch of a bottled version of the drug in the United States, which will be sold at half the list price of the pen injector. Tactical choice: The manufacturer thus intends to attract patients who are not covered by coinsurance but are ready to pay out of pocket, while simplifying the supply, as the bottling of drugs is industrially more complex than the production of injection pens.
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