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 […]
September 25, 2024 — This was definitely a textbook case of sitting in the hot seat. For more than two hours the CEO of Novo Nordisk, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, faced intense questions in the Senate HELP Committee about drug pricing for the company’s diabetes and obesity medicines. If you want a sense of the tone for the hearing, consider […]
September 19, 2024 — Maybe you’ve noticed this is an election year. This might explain some of the heat on pricing that both obesity drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are feeling. Both of the U.S. candidates for president are making promises to bring down drug prices. Senator Bernie Sanders and his Senate health committee is turning up […]
September 7, 2024 — Recently, Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen did a rare interview with NBC News to talk about the high price of obesity medicines that are proving to be so important for so many people. It seemed like a dress rehearsal for his coming appearance at a Senate hearing on the subject. He brought up the […]
August 27, 2024 — How big might the semaglutide budget bomb be? The authors of a new brief report in Annals of Internal Medicine today are making a point. How threatening can we make this sound? Right up front in their title, they label their estimates as the “maximum costs of expanded Medicare coverage of semaglutide for cardiovascular risk […]
August 9, 2024 — This week has given us a study in contrasts. The leading makers of obesity medicines, Lilly and Novo Nordisk, posted quarterly reports and received sharply different responses. When Novo Nordisk released their report on Wednesday, the market value of the stock plunged by eight percent. The next day, Lilly reported results and saw its market […]
August 5, 2024 — Should we celebrate the news that, in FDA drug shortage listings, all forms of tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound) are listed as “available”? Is this a sign that we are on our way to the nightmarishly short supply of GLP1s will soon be behind us? Forgive us for being skeptical, but we’re not quite ready to […]
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 22, 2024 — A gray market for obesity medicines is thriving. The quality of the products in this market range from reasonable to sketchy to utterly unreliable. But millions of people are taking a chance on them. Big pharma companies innovated to bring fully vetted formulations of important medicines to market, spending billions of dollars to do it. […]
June 12, 2024 — Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to let this go. Novo Nordisk isn’t eager to cut its thousand-dollar list price for Ozempic. Nor is it eager to face a grilling about this in the Senate. So yesterday, Sanders announced that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee will vote next Tuesday on a subpoena for […]
