Pharma’s big push for a new generation of obesity drugs

FIVE YEARSLVMH ago Novo Nordisk was a boring Danish drugmaker whose diabetes medications were reliably profitable. The only time the company made headlines was when it was caught up in complaints about the high cost of insulin. Then in 2021 a trial of a higher dose of its diabetes drug, Ozempic, showed that people taking it lost weight. A great deal of weight—up to 15% of their body mass. Excitement about the drug has kept Novo Nordisk in the headlines. Its market value has nearly quadrupled in the past five years. Earlier this month it reached $444bn, handbagging , a purveyor of luxury goods, off its perch as Europe’s most valuable company. Novo Nordisk’s main rival, Eli Lilly, which has a similar drug called Mounjaro (tirzepatide), is worth $522bn, more than four times what it was at the start of 2019.It isn’t just investors who are jubilant. Not long ago Morgan Stanley, a bank, estimated that global sales of such weight-management drugs could reach $54bn annually by 2030. Now it puts the figure at $77bn. By comparison, last year they raked in just $2.4bn. The potential bonanza is attracting imitators. These include big pharma (for instance, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim and Pfizer), not-so-big pharma (Jiangsu Hengrui, Structure Therapeutics) and biotech startups (Carmot Therapeutics in California, Gmax Biopharm and Sciwind Biosciences in Hangzhou).