Ahead of plans to raise the price of its Type 2 diabetes and obesity blockbuster in the U.K. next month, Eli Lilly is temporarily halting Mounjaro orders from the country.
Lilly plans to resume taking requisitions for the dual GIP/GLP-1 agonist in the U.K. on Sept. 1 but has temporarily paused the process via a “month-end cut off for orders,” a Lilly spokesperson confirmed with Fierce Pharma.
To help manage its stock and preserve access to the drug, Lilly has product allocated for pharmacies and healthcare providers that order from the company, according to an emailed statement. In justifying its decision, Lilly cited legal protections in the U.K. meant to prevent “inappropriate” drug stockpiling by providers.
“We encourage patients to only order based on their current treatment plan, to reduce the risk of localized disruption,” the company’s statement continued.
If providers in the U.K. are stockpiling Lilly’s drug tirzepatide—which is approved in both obesity and diabetes under the singular Mounjaro brand name in most countries outside the U.S.—then it’s almost certainly due to the fact that Lilly has telegraphed plans to raise the medicine’s price there significantly.
Two weeks back, Lilly said it planned to raise Mounjaro’s U.K. list price by as much as 170% under an agreement with the country’s government. The price increase applies to private providers that negotiate their own discounts, rather than the U.K.’s National Health Service, according to a Financial Times report earlier this month.
At the time, FT suggested the price for a month’s supply of the drug in the U.K. would climb from 122 pounds sterling to 330 pounds.
Regarding the requisition pause, Lilly allegedly told two British wholesalers to temporarily stop taking Mounjaro orders amid a demand spike prompted by the price increase, The Guardian reported Thursday. Pharmacies had reported panic buying of the incretin medicine in the wake of Lilly’s announcement, according to the U.K. news outlet.
Lilly’s pricing decision was packaged as an endorsement of the Trump administration’s goal to more fairly share the costs of innovative drugs across developed countries.
"[P]rices for medicines paid by governments and health systems need to increase in other developed markets like Europe in order to make them lower in the US,” Lilly said in a statement earlier this month, adding that it has recently “intensified efforts to align prices across developed countries.”
While Lilly indicated it was pursuing price adjustments in multiple locations, it’s currently unclear how those will play out in countries beyond the U.K. Lilly has said it plans to implement the adjusted U.K. price for Mounjaro on Sept. 1.
The U.K. price hike comes after the Trump administration put renewed pressure on many large drugmakers last month to implement so-called “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) drug pricing, which effectively seeks to recalibrate the U.S. costs of certain prescription medicines in line with lower prices offered in other developed nations.
While Lilly broadly supports rebalancing drug prices between the U.S. and Europe, the company’s CEO, David Ricks, warned earlier this month that importing “foreign price controls” into a “U.S. ecosystem that isn’t built to function for patients” risks embracing “the worst of two worlds.”
He defined those unfavorable tradeoffs as “the low productivity and output of Europe’s biopharma sector with the high out-of-pocket and distorted prices of the U.S. insurance market.”
Stateside, Lilly has made several efforts over the past few years to improve the access to and affordability of its medicines in the U.S.
Notably, Lilly in 2023 said it would lower insulin prices by 70% and cap out-of-pocket costs for patients who rely on the critical diabetes drug in the U.S. The company has also launched a direct-to-consumer platform dubbed LillyDirect that sells certain medicines to cash-paying patients at a discount to their standard list prices.