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Novo Nordisk is following in Eli Lilly’s footsteps and launching an online pharmacy that allows people to buy its weight-loss drug directly from the company. It’s the latest sign of Lilly’s strong standing in the lucrative obesity race despite its competitor’s first-mover advantage. The news The Danish pharmaceutical firm announced the creation of NovoCare, a direct-to-consumer online pharmacy that will sell its obesity drug Wegovy at a discounted monthly price of $499. The offer is eligible for people with a valid Wegovy prescription who will pay cash and either don’t have health insurance or have a plan that excludes coverage of obesity medications. The monthly price is the same for all doses of Wegovy, which start at 0.25 milligrams and go up to 2.4 milligrams; patients generally start on a lower dose, work their way up over time and then take “maintenance” doses to keep maintain weight loss. The standard list price for Wegovy is $1,349 per month, though the company says that most people with insurance don’t pay that much themselves. The announcement Wednesday comes two weeks after U.S. drug regulators said a shortage of Wegovy and its sister medication Ozempic, which is used to treat type 2 diabetes, has ended after more than two years of supply crunches. Wegovy and Ozempic, which are both once-weekly injections, share an active ingredient called semaglutide. The shortage resolution was a blow to so-called compounding pharmacies that were able to offer cheaper copycat versions of semaglutide because it was in shortage. Currently, Novo is ratcheting up the pressure on the likes of compounders such as Hims & Hers with the direct-to-consumer offering. Big picture With NovoCare, Novo Nordisk also is taking a page out of Eli Lilly’s playbook to meet strong demand for obesity medicines, often called GLP-1s in reference to a gut hormone that the drugs mimic to effectively suppress appetite. In August, Lilly began offering a discounted form of Zepbound , its blockbuster obesity treatment, to cash-paying patients with valid prescriptions through its online pharmacy LillyDirect. Just last week, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker lowered prices on the two starter doses available on LillyDirect and made higher doses of the medicine available through the service. The company first launched LillyDirect in January 2024, as a way to connect patients to telehealth providers who could write them a prescription for weight-loss drugs including Zepbound. Lilly’s platform also offers prescription delivery. The version of Zepbound offered through LillyDirect comes in single-dose vials, a relatively new option. The drug has historically been delivered via autoinjector pens, which emerged as a major bottleneck in ramping up supply. In the autoinjector form, the list price of Zepbound is roughly $1,086 a month, though what patients end up paying varies based on insurance. On its face, Novo getting into the direct-to-consumer game ups the competitive pressure on its main GLP-1 rival Lilly. However, the market is not really concerned, based on Wednesday’s stock moves. Shares of Novo were up about 4%, but Lilly also was up almost 1%. In other words, just because it’s good news for Novo does not automatically mean it’s bad news for Lilly. This is just additional evidence that in some areas, Novo is playing catch-up to Lilly despite Ozempic and Wegovy hitting the U.S. market in 2017 and 2021, respectively, years before Lilly’s offerings got there. Lilly’s Mounjaro for type-2 diabetes came out in 2022, followed by Zepbound for obesity in late 2023. Both drugs share an active ingredient called tirzepatide and are once-weekly injections. The GLP-1 craze took off in 2022 thanks to social media, as users touted the weight-loss capabilities of Ozempic. Recent prescription trends have been favorable for Zepbound and suggest its U.S. market share is getting close to equal with Wegovy, according to a recent note from Bernstein analysts. Zepbound generates more weight loss on average than Wegovy, a Lilly-funded study comparing the two drugs found in December . Lilly, as the larger company, also has been able to use its scale to invest more heavily in manufacturing capacity to help meet the booming demand for its medicines. Zepbound came off the Food and Drug Administration’s shortage list in December. Looking at both companies’ pipelines of weight-loss treatments, Lilly is currently in a stronger spot after Novo suffered a setback in December, when its next-generation drug known as CagriSema missed expectations . Shares of Novo are still about 12% below where they traded before that data release. Shares of Lilly — despite a sour start to 2025 thanks in part to noisy fourth-quarter results for Zepbound — have climbed more than 20% over the same timeframe. To be sure, Lilly’s pipeline has a big hurdle to clear in the coming months with the release of late-stage trial results for its oral GLP-1 orforglipron. The first trial readout is expected in May and looks at the drug’s efficacy in patients with type 2 diabetes, followed by a second readout later in the year focused on obesity. The releases are highly anticipated because a weight-loss pill like orforglipron is considered crucial to the obesity market reaching its full commercial potential, given it is easier to manufacture than injectable versions and could be used as part of maintenance regimes to keep weight off. Bottom line Lilly remains in a great spot in the GLP-1 race, even as Novo Nordisk takes steps to better compete in areas such as direct-to-consumer pharmacy. The demand for this class of drugs remains robust, and Lilly just needs to execute well on scaling up capacity and expanding access to more patients. Its recent tweaks to LillyDirect’s cash-paying option fit within the latter, as does its partnership with telehealth provider Ro , which was announced in December. On the pipeline front, Lilly executives have tried to manage investor expectations so the market does not set a lofty bar for the results that will be hard to clear. That’s especially important for the first orforglipron trial because people with type-2 diabetes tend to lose less weight on GLP-1s than those without the condition. Still, there are portfolio management considerations to be had. After a slow start to 2025, Eli Lilly has once again found itself near the top of the market leaderboard thanks to reassuring signs of a strong 2025 and a bid for health-care stocks. In a volatile market where gains can quickly be erased, we have discussed internally when the best level might be to sell back some of the shares we picked up in the low $700s in November and January. Lilly stock is currently trading just below $920. It closed at a record high of $960 back on Aug. 30. Although we’re making no decisions on Wednesday, it is tempting to sell some shares near their year-to-date highs to buy something that has been beaten down over the past few weeks. That kind of strategic thinking is by no means a sign of waning faith in Lilly. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long LLY. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injection pen, March 28, 2024.
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Novo Nordisk is following in Eli Lilly’s footsteps and launching an online pharmacy that allows people to buy its weight-loss drug directly from the company.
It’s the latest sign of Lilly’s strong standing in the lucrative obesity race despite its competitor’s first-mover advantage.
