With just a few months to go before Eli Lilly expects to launch its own oral GLP-1 obesity drug, Novo Nordisk is making the most of its head start with the Wegovy pill.
In the second week of oral Wegovy’s launch, which ended Jan. 16, the pill logged roughly 18,400 total prescriptions, according to IMS data cited in a Friday note from analysts at Jefferies. Other tracking data put the second week of Wegovy pill prescriptions closer to 20,000, the analyst team pointed out.
The quick uptake of Novo’s new oral obesity offering is impressive and appears “numerically higher” than both injectable Wegovy (roughly 1,600 prescriptions) and its Lilly counterpart Zepbound (around 7,300 prescriptions) in the first two weeks of their respective launches, the Jefferies team said.
That’s good news for Novo, which needs to capitalize on the Wegovy pill’s prospects to regain some of the obesity market territory it ceded to Lilly last year.
In late December, Novo’s Wegovy pill became the first oral GLP-1 to win FDA approval to treat obesity. The medication, which is taken once daily and can be given at a maintenance dose of up to 25 mg, is also cleared for cardiovascular risk reduction.
Wasting little time, Novo kicked off the pill’s launch Jan. 5, setting the monthly cost for a starting 1.5-mg dose at $149 for cash-paying patients. Commercially insured patients using Novo’s savings plan can potentially pay as low as $25 per month for the drug, the company said at the time.
Looking at the broader obesity environment, the Jefferies team suggested that the swift uptake of Novo’s pill is encouraging for Lilly’s orforglipron, an oral GLP-1 the Indianapolis pharma is now hoping to launch in the spring.
Meanwhile, the analyst team figures that Lilly’s injectable Zepbound (tirzepatide) will remain “dominant” in the indication, even over orals, citing the dual GIP/GLP-1 med's “superior” efficacy, safety and tolerability as well as its “flattened price” following Lilly’s most-favored-nation deal with the White House last year.
Over at Evercore ISI, Umer Raffat’s analyst team was even buzzier about the Wegovy pill’s performance in its first two weeks on the market, with Raffat describing the med's early launch performance as “a headline in and of itself.”
Raffat framed the launch in terms of Novo’s other oral semaglutide drug, Rybelsus, which is dosed at 14 mg and is approved to treat Type 2 diabetes. Right out of the gate, oral Wegovy—again at 25 mg for obesity—is already approaching nearly half of Rybelsus’ weekly volume with roughly 20,000 prescriptions, by Raffat’s reckoning, versus Rybelsus’ weekly average of 50,000.
Ahead of the Wegovy pill’s launch, “some skeptics had often cited the limited uptake of Rybelsus as a leading indicator for oral Wegovy,” Raffat explained. “[C]learly that analogy is not holding true.”
Novo’s launch is providing the company with a much-needed market shake-up after slowing growth in recent years put the company’s share price through the wringer. So far this year, Novo's share price has increased in value by more than 20%, although the price remains down over longer time frames.