Novo Nordisk Eats Eli Lilly’s Dust Again
The maker of Ozempic and Wegovy keeps slipping on banana peels when it tries to regain its position in GLP-1s. Yesterday, Novo Nordisk announced that a new weight loss shot it hoped would rival Eli Lilly’s injectable actually underperformed in a head-to-head trial, tanking Novo’s stock.
Shares of the Danish drugmaker fell 16% on the news that Novo’s CagriSema delivered 20.2% weight loss in 84 weeks, compared with 23.6% for Lilly’s tirzepatide, aka Zepbound. The airball comes as Novo scrambles to regain a majority share of the GLP-1 market, which it lost to Lilly in recent months.
“This outcome is the worst-case scenario,” said Michael Shah, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. The disappointment follows a management shakeup, a failed semaglutide Alzheimer’s trial, and a failed acquisition of a promising biotech company. Novo’s GLP-1 patents are also set to expire sooner than Lilly’s, which is another reason it was counting on CagriSema to succeed.
To make matters worse for Novo, Lilly’s stock climbed a few points yesterday after it launched a new version of its Zepbound injectable, which holds a month’s worth of shots—up from one week for its current devices.
How the mighty have fallen: Novo has lost ~$475 billion in value since 2024, when it was worth $650+ billion. Its stock price now verges on pre-Wegovy times.—ML
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