Novo Nordisk Offering Large Discount on Wegovy in Bid to Recapture Market

It's been a tough year for Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind the GLP-1 drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. Competitors are nipping at its heels, cheaper knockoffs have been eating into its sales, and it just gave the boot to its former CEO.

Now, hoping its worst days are behind it, Novo says it's offering customers a massive discount on Wegovy, the weight-loss variant of its flagship drug semaglutide.

For your first month of treatment, Reuters reports, you can nab a batch of Wegovy injections for $199 until June 30, Novo said. After that, it'll set you back $499 per month — which is still a lot of money, but the drug used to cost an outrageous $1,000 per month without insurance, so at least it's a step toward broader access.

Don't mistake this for benevolence, though, or even necessarily a sign of growing desperation, though there may be a component of that as well. Instead, Novo is looking to capitalize on a massive victory it was handed last month, when the Food and Drug Administration instituted a crackdown on pharmacies offering compounded forms of semaglutide. The ban took effect this week, following a lengthy grace period. 

Compounded drugs are created by a pharmacy, sometimes by using alternative ingredients, to tailor a drug to a patient's specific needs, typically at a much lower cost than buying it straight from a manufacturer. 

On the one hand, this gives patients access to medications they normally wouldn't be able to afford. But the lack of regulation has raised concerns over the drugs' safety, which have only grown in volume as compounding pharmacies have shot up — and shut down — across the country.

Following the FDA decision, hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to their knockoff semaglutide, the New York Times reported, providing a huge windfall for Novo. With the discounts, it's eagerly poised to sweep up a huge amount of new customers, who are desperate not to derail their weight loss journey.

"We are doubling down on our commitment to accessibility, availability, and affordability of authentic, FDA-approved Wegovy," Dave Moore, executive vice president of Novo's US operations, said in a statement.

The once most valuable company in Europe still faces increasingly stiff competition, however.

Eli Lilly overtook US prescriptions for Wegovy with its Zepbound weight loss shot last year. Inflaming the rivalry, a just-published head-to-head trial showed that Zepbound users lost 50 percent more weight than those who took Novo's drug. Eli Lilly also has a pill version waiting in the wings that promises to be just as effective as semaglutide, precipitating a drop in the Danish company's stock, which has never rebounded to its $615 billion peak in market capitalization nearly two years ago.

More on drugs: Eli Lilly's New Weight Loss Drug May Have the Worst Name in Pharmaceutical History

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