Novo Nordisk appears to be letting compounded GLP-1 bygones be bygones—at least, in one respect.
Earlier this year, the Danish pharma traded barbs with telehealth provider Hims & Hers over the latter’s practice of selling compounded versions of semaglutide, the drug better known as Novo’s blockbusters Wegovy and Ozempic.
But with the drug no longer eligible for compounding, the Big Pharma has struck something of a truce with Hims. The companies announced Tuesday that brand-name Wegovy will now be available through the Hims platform beginning this week.
A $599 bundled monthly subscription will give self-pay members access to Hims & Hers’ 24/7 clinical support and nutritional guidance, plus prescriptions for all doses of Wegovy for weight management via the drugmaker’s NovoCare Pharmacy.
Novo launched the direct-to-consumer NovoCare service in March, offering Wegovy for $499 for self-pay customers. Shortly afterward, the drugmaker expanded that price point to include all eligible cash-paying patients at retail pharmacies. Without insurance or any discounts, the list price for a month’s supply of Wegovy is around $1,350.
Novo and Hims said in the announcement that their team-up will eventually stretch further than the initial Wegovy deal, though they didn’t provide specifics of their future together.
“Beyond this initial collaboration, the companies are developing a roadmap that combines Novo Nordisk’s innovative medications with Hims & Hers’ ability to deliver access to quality care at scale, with the goal of improving long-term outcomes for more people living with chronic disease, and doing that more affordably,” Dave Moore, executive vice president of U.S. operations and global business development and president of Novo Nordisk in the U.S., said in a statement.
Along with the Hims deal, Novo also inked pacts this week with two other telehealth companies. Customers will be able to access Wegovy at the $499-per-month price via Ro and LifeMD, as both have integrated NovoCare into their own platforms, too.
With the deals, Novo follows in the footsteps of fellow GLP-1 maker Eli Lilly, which has announced several telehealth partnerships of its own in recent months. Since December, Lilly has teamed up with Ro, LifeMD and Teladoc Health to offer lower-cost access to weight loss drug Zepbound.
Structured similarly to the Novo deals, the Lilly partnerships integrate the pharma’s GiftHealth self-pay pharmacy into the telehealth platforms. Monthly supplies of Zepbound are available at a range of prices between $399 and $549, depending on the dose; the regular list price without insurance is about $1,086.
Novo’s move to join forces with Hims stands in stark contrast to the much more adversarial air that hung between the two just a few months ago.
At the end of January, Hims released a Super Bowl ad that, without naming names, called out the U.S. weight loss industry at large, including makers of GLP-1 obesity drugs, saying they were “priced for profits, not patients.” The commercial went on to tout Hims’ own access to compounded versions of those drugs.
The ad sparked several weeks’ worth of debate. After it aired during the Feb. 9 game, Novo responded by running ads in national newspapers questioning the safety of compounded semaglutide.
Since then, however, semaglutide has been removed from the FDA shortage list, making it ineligible for compounding. Amid an ongoing legal challenge to that move from makers of the copycat meds, a federal court recently ruled that small compounders must immediately stop making their versions of Wegovy and Ozempic, while larger compounders have until May 22 to cease operations.
The compounders’ lawsuit is based in skepticism that Novo’s drugs are actually out of shortage; in its announcement of the trio of partnerships Tuesday, Novo reiterated that “all doses of Wegovy are fully available.”