By Patrick Wingrove and Manas Mishra
(Reuters) -Novo Nordisk said on Wednesday it would begin selling its weight-loss drug Wegovy at a discounted price of $499 per month to patients paying cash, as it grappled with shifts to the competitive dynamic of the U.S. obesity drug market.
The move comes just over a week after rival Eli Lilly started selling more doses of its own obesity drug Zepbound in vials for $499 per month, and cut the prices of doses already sold on its direct-to-consumer website by $50.
Compounding pharmacies that have been selling hundreds of thousands of doses of copies of Wegovy while the medicines were in shortage are also running out of time to produce them.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in February removed Wegovy from its shortage list as well and told compounders to cease selling copies in the coming months, having removed Zepbound in December.
Drug compounders led by industry trade group Outsourcing Facilities Association sued the FDA last month over its decision to remove Wegovy from its list of drugs in shortage. They previously sued over the agency’s declaration that Lilly’s tirzepatide drugs, including Zepbound, were no longer in short supply.
The FDA said last month that some compounding pharmacies had until the court makes its decision in the earlier case to stop selling compounded tirzepatide, but has not said whether the same deadline applies to copies of Wegovy.
Wegovy can cost patients more than $1,000 a month if they do not have health insurance coverage for the drug.
Novo said the discounted Wegovy doses, offered through its NovoCare Pharmacy program, will be available to uninsured patients or eligible patients with commercial insurance who do not have coverage for obesity medicines.
(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru and Patrick Wingrove in New York; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Bernadette Baum)
Comments