February 7, 2025 — Novo Nordisk and Lilly reported on their business results this week for the final quarter of 2024. These reports brought clarity on a number of points, but to us, one thing stands out. We are moving from euphoria and hype about limitless possibilities in obesity to the realities of market competition and incremental progress. Sales […]
December 30, 2024 — This year is rapidly winding down and already, our gaze is shifting toward expectations for the coming year. So before that shift is complete and we start making predictions for 2025, let’s check the scorecard for the expectations we had for 2024. A year ago, we put forward predictions of five hot topics for the […]
November 9, 2024 — The wild ride that has been 2024 in the market for obesity care is not quite over yet. If you want to know exactly how wild this ride has been, take a moment to digest the results that the two leaders in obesity – Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk – have posted. The sales Lilly […]
October 27, 2024 — It seems that both Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are dreaming of a bigger ban on competition for their wildly successful obesity drugs. With semaglutide and tirzepatide, they have valuable assets that meet a tremendous medical need. And they really do not like the compounding pharmacies taking big bites from their apples. So this week, […]
October 3, 2024 — Late yesterday, FDA announced that Lilly’s tirzepatide shortage is officially over. Both Mounjaro and Zepbound are fully available in all marketed strengths and dosage forms. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined the shortage of tirzepatide injection, a glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) medication, has been resolved. Tirzepatide injection has been in shortage since 2022 […]
July 27, 2024 — It’s been a rough month for investors in Lilly and Novo Nordisk – largely because of the prospects for rising competition to their wildly successful obesity medicines. Accelerating VK2735 This week, Viking Therapeutics announced they are accelerating development of injectable form of VK2735, a dual agonist that works on both GLP-1 and GIP receptors. This […]
July 13, 2024 — Barely seven months ago, business reporters were telling us Pfizer had decided to “drop,” “stop,” “can,” or “pull the plug” on danuglipron – an oral small molecule for obesity. But as we pointed out at the time, they missed the real story. Pfizer was shifting its gears to focus on a once daily form of […]
June 25, 2024 — It’s over. The 84th Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association came to an end yesterday and for anyone interested in obesity, it has given us a lot to absorb. After four days with a steady stream of new information about drugs like the GLP-1 agonists that regulate appetite and adiposity, we are left wondering. […]
April 4, 2024 — We have much to learn from a recent crisis of escalating insulin prices. This is the bottom line of a new paper in Diabetes Care. In short, multifaceted public policy action eased that crisis. So it has important implications for issues with anticompetitive pricing of diabetes and obesity medicines broadly. Anticompetitive Pricing Practices Authors Kathryn […]
March 28, 2024 — A new economic analysis in JAMA Network Open brings unsurprising news: manufacturing costs for GLP-1 agonists are a tiny fraction of the price for these important medicines. This is always the case for innovative prescription drugs that must recover billions of dollars of development costs in order to be profitable. The response from policy makers […]
