As Novo Nordisk’s hotly anticipated Wegovy pill gets off to the races in the U.S., the company is making sure to cover its supply bases overseas, too.
Novo plans to invest in an expansion of its facility in Athlone, Ireland, to produce its Wegovy pill for markets beyond the U.S., the company’s CEO, Mike Doustdar, told Bloomberg News in a newly published interview.
Doustdar provided scant details on the scope of the project or the investment Novo has planned, tying the move back to Novo’s hope that the Wegovy pill will help reclaim some of the obesity market ground it has lost to U.S. rival Eli Lilly.
“If we were about to throw in the towel we would not be investing in factories in Ireland,” the CEO told Bloomberg.
When reached for more detail, a Novo spokesperson said the company had no further comments on its plans for the time being.
Doustdar’s eye on Ireland comes shortly into the U.S. launch of the Wegovy pill, which has done stellar by almost all accounts—despite a brief compounding imbroglio with Hims & Hers last week.
Approved by the FDA in late December, the Wegovy pill officially launched Jan. 5 and almost immediately began to log impressive prescribing stats. More than 170,000 people were taking the Wegovy pill some four weeks into its launch, Doustdar said during Novo’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call earlier this month, and the figure now stands above 240,000 prescriptions, he told Bloomberg.
The pill’s strong launch was threatened briefly last week by the announcement from online health and wellness company Hims & Hers that it had debuted its own compounded, GLP-1-containing pill for obesity just weeks into Novo’s branded rollout. Nevertheless, a patent lawsuit from Novo and a pledge from the FDA to take action against the legally nebulous trend of mass GLP-1 compounding caused Hims to back down.
Novo’s Wegovy pill has yet to win a green light outside the U.S. The company submitted filings for the oral obesity drug to the European Medicines Agency and other regulators in the second half of 2025 and is currently expecting EU approval early this year.
As for the Danish drugmaker’s current setup in Ireland, Novo in late 2023 said that it would purchase a pill factory from Alkermes in Athlone for about $91 million.
Alongside roughly 400 employees, the plant equipped Novo with “additional development and manufacturing capacity for current and future oral products,” Novo’s then senior vice president of product supply and emerging technologies, Thilde G. Hummel Bøgebjerg, said in a statement at the time.