Novo Nordisk is taking a page out of Eli Lilly’s playbook as the two GLP-1 drugmakers work to fend off compounding pharmacies that have been producing cheaper versions of their popular obesity products.
The Danish pharma’s newly launched NovoCare Pharmacy offers direct home shipping of blockbuster obesity med Wegovy (semaglutide) for cash-paying patients without insurance coverage at a reduced cost of $499 per month. That price applies to all of the drug's five dosage strengths and comes at a sharp discount to the drug’s current list price of $1,349 per package.
The offer expands access to Wegovy’s once-weekly, single-dose pen “amidst the dangers of fake or illegitimate compounded 'semaglutide,'" the company noted in its March 5 press release.
"Novo Nordisk continues to advance solutions for patients that improve affordability and access to our medicines, whether they have insurance or not,” Dave Moore, executive vice president of Novo’s U.S. operations and its head of global business development, said in a statement.
As it stands, 90% of Wegovy patients who have insurance coverage for weight management medicines pay between $0 to $25 per month for the drug, Moore added. The latest savings offer will be updated “in the near future” to extend to patients who use traditional retail pharmacies, according to the company.
NovoCare, which partners with CenterWell Pharmacy for fulfillment, is part of Novo’s response to the cheaper compounded versions of its medicines that the company has been vocal in warning against.
The NovoCare rollout and Wegovy price cut follow similar moves by Novo's chief rival in the obesity market, Eli Lilly. Last month, Lilly cut the price of its Zepbound for self-paying patients through its LillyDirect online pharmacy, bringing its 2.5 mg single-dose vials to $349 per month and its 5 mg version to $499 per month.
In recent years, compounding pharmacies have been permitted to manufacture copycat versions of Novo’s semaglutide and Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide while the two products were on the FDA’s shortage list. Lilly and Novo attempted to crack down on the copycats as they worked to bolster manufacturing capacity, warning patients about dangers of compounded medicines and filing lawsuits against certain sellers.
Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound were removed from the list last year and Novo’s Wegovy and Ozempic made it off the FDA shortage list in February. In the wake of the semaglutide development, shares of telehealth company Hims & Hers, which had been marketing compounded GLP-1s, plummeted.
Him & Hers, which made headlines with a Super Bowl ad taking shots at the healthcare industry for profiting off of the obesity epidemic, agreed to no longer provide its compounded semaglutide after this year's first quarter. Meanwhile, others are digging their heels in with lawsuits accusing the FDA of wrongfully declaring the drugs out of shortage.