The past year was one of turbulence and change at Novo Nordisk, and, while the Danish drugmaker still has its work cut out for 2026, new CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar appears confident in his commercial and R&D battle plan for the coming months.
Taking the stage at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Tuesday, Doustdar outlined three priorities for Novo in 2026: accelerating commercial execution with new launches and direct-to-patient (DTP) sales expansions, progressing the pipeline and, finally, balancing financial discipline while “investing where the investments are needed.”
During his presentation, Doustdar—who was tapped by Novo’s board to replace longtime CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen last summer—didn’t hesitate to acknowledge the company’s “difficult 2025.”
Despite being the first to crack the prescription obesity drug market with its GLP-1 Wegovy (semaglutide)—and Saxenda before that—Novo has since ceded its lead in the U.S. to chief rival Eli Lilly and suffered a steep share-price decline starting in mid-2024. Apart from its fierce Lilly rivalry, Novo has also had to grapple with the sizable U.S. compounding industry, which began selling GLP-1s en masse earlier in the decade amid previous Wegovy and Zepbound shortages.
To bounce back, Novo will go all-in on “commercial execution” in the new year, Doustdar said Tuesday, stressing the need for his company to adapt to the unique market that has formed around weight loss incretins.
“We have seen that, especially within the field of obesity, this acts a lot more as a consumer business than a traditional medication,” Doustdar said.
“Mastering that is something high on our agenda,” he added, referring to the use of DTP and cash pay channels to market Novo’s metabolic medicines.
Reflecting on Novo’s turbulent past year, Doustdar said he didn’t want to “belittle” the challenges the company or its shareholders have faced, while asserting that the experience marked the “curse of a leader.”
When Novo made its first foray into obesity R&D some 30 years ago, it was the odd company out, with many of its peers failing to recognize the condition as a legitimate disease, Doustdar explained.
“I am really happy that I work for a company that became the voice of 2 billion people and created the scenario that today, pretty much every participant of J.P. Morgan is getting excited about entering this field,” he said, referring to global estimates of the number of people living with diabetes or obesity.
Ultimately, 2025 proved the year in which Novo had to accept that “we’re no longer on our own, and we need to hurry up,” Doustdar said.
Expanding GLP-1 availability through new approaches like DTP platforms will be paramount to Novo’s course correction, Doustdar said, acknowledging that the influx of telehealth providers and even compounding pharmacies in recent years was born out of a very real access deficit.
Aside from Novo’s own DTP platform, NovoCare Pharmacy, Doustdar highlighted the numerous partnerships the company has inked with the likes of Ro, LifeMD, Amazon, Weight Watchers and others to help make its GLP-1s more accessible.
Meanwhile, widening the obesity market with innovations such as Novo’s once-daily Wegovy pill—which launched last week—will also be critical, the CEO argued.
“Right now, we are being judged,” he said. “How many patients are being switched between us and Eli Lilly. And while that is an important element not to belittle again, us and Lilly combined probably have 10 [million or] 15 million patients. What about the other 85 million? We need to get to them.”
On the R&D front, Novo’s work in diabetes and obesity has offered inroads into adjacent development spaces such as chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis.
While Novo will continue to investigate drugs in those diseases, moving forward, the company will use diabetes and obesity as a “starting point” rather than trying “to rush in” to new indications, Doustdar explained.
The move is about “taking the company back to the DNA we have,” the CEO said, adding, “we are really good when we focus.”
Hoping to assuage potential concerns about the slightly scaled-back R&D focus, Doustdar pointed to the immense unmet need that remains in diabetes and obesity. Globally, just 7% of the more than 550 million people living with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes receive a GLP-1, and that figure goes down to roughly 2% when accounting for the more than 900 million people around the world with obesity, according to a presentation prepared by Novo for JPM.
“This is a very, very large unmet need where we and our competition today are only touching the surface when it comes to treatment of these individuals,” Doustdar said.