Last year, when Novo Nordisk launched the diet drug Wegovy, the company hired American rapper and actor Queen Queen Latifah (Queen Latifah) to launch a publicity campaign designed to eliminate the stigma often centered around obesity treatments.
A year on, there is little indication that the public is unwilling to accept the drug. A late-stage clinical trial showed that the drug lost an average of 15% of their body weight. However, the Danish company has been burdened by its success. Surge demand and production constraints have led to a general shortage of Wegovy.
The generic name of the drug, semaglutide, is an appetite-suppressing drug that has forced Novo Nordisk to temporarily stop marketing and rethink its production strategy. It also provides an opportunity for Lilly, Amgen, and several biotechnology companies developing similar weight-loss drugs to try to catch up in the field. Analysts predict that the market could be worth $50 billion a year by 2030.
Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fregard Jorgensen (Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen) told the Financial Times that this blowout launch, more or less of the vertical absorption curve, has changed the robustness of handling problems.
He acknowledged that Novo Nordisk did not anticipate significant demand for Wegovy, based on a slowdown in sales growth of the company's early diet drug Saxenda. Saxenda Help patients to lose about 5% of their body weight. Jorgensen revealed that the company's goal is to address production problems by the end of the year, enabling it to promote Wegovy in the U. S. and launch Wegovy in several European countries.
A rising $50-billion variety
Obesity affects approximately 650 million people worldwide. The rush among drug companies to introduce a new generation of obesity-treating drugs has caused unrest among some critics, who warn that they could be abused and have side effects. But most health experts say the drugs should have a very positive impact on obese patients.
Obesity is associated with health problems such as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and high blood pressure. But less than 1 percent of the estimated 71 million obese US adults between 2012 and 2016 were obese, according to a report by the Government Responsibility Agency (GAO).
Doctors say that obesity is increasingly seen as a disease requiring treatment, rather than some sort of moral decay or laziness, in part because of these new drugs.
"Now, we are seeing a very large need for semaglutide, and I have some patients who are unable to use this drug."Said Fatima Stanford (Fatima Stanford), an obesity specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston." Emphasis needs to be placed on increasing supply.”
Analysts predict that diet drugs will be the next blockbuster drug category, equivalent to the revolution in treating hypertension in the 1980s.
Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Pursell (Mark Purcell) said conservative pricing assumptions suggest that global sales of obesity-related products could exceed $50 billion by 2030. This would lift obesity from the $2.4 billion category to the top 12 treatment areas spent spending.
Purcell's co-author report, "Unlocking Obesity Challenges: a $50 billion + Market," predicts that the market will be driven by several factors: greater awareness of obesity drugs to save lives; eliminating supply constraints; the role of social media in promoting drugs, and greater focus on the role of weight loss in addressing diabetes.
