Novo Nordisk has become a global sensation with its popular weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. On Wednesday, the Danish multinational pharmaceutical company announced that it would begin selling its weight-loss drug Wegovy at a discounted price of $499 per month to patients paying cash.
The company has become a leading player in the diabetes as well as obesity spaces and now the drugmaker is planning to implement a similar strategy in the growth of other disease areas in its therapeutic portfolio.
During a global press briefing on Thursday, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, CEO, Novo Nordisk informed that the company is planning to expand its footprint with a consistent focus in cardiometabolic diseases and rare diseases.
“…we are super happy with what we’ve seen with semaglutide. Semaglutide has been demonstrated to be a really good drug for diabetes, lowering glucose, but also a really good drug in terms of obesity by lowering the body weight. What is also interesting is that Smaglutide actually allows us to look at the cardiometabolic state in a holistic way. So we’ve demonstrated, both now in diabetes and obesity, that semaglutide is associated with a decrease in risk of cardiovascular events and cardiovascular disease, but it’s also been shown to decrease the risk of heart failure, the risk of kidney disease, the risk of liver disease. Some of this already in our labels,” Jørgensen said on Thursday.
The CEO also revealed that they are currently in the in the process of updating their label with the data on liver disease.
“We are still investigating additional benefits, of semaglutide, including what semaglutide, for example, can do in Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.
‘Address unmet needs in serious chronic diseases’
Martin Holst Lange, Executive Vice President, Development, Novo Nordisk, highlighted during the press briefing that their purpose is to address unmet needs in serious chronic disease and a holistic approach is necessary.
“Our focus is to address efficacy and safety but also address comorbidities existing in diabetes and obesity. We also had to acknowledge living every day with a chronic disease is an every burden. So to address this, we have a number of new assets in our pipeline. Some of them are shown in this slide. Cagracemma is a combination of the well known GLP-one biology with a novel biology called Amlan biology addressing both diabetes with obesity but potentially also cardiovascular, liver, and kidney disease. Same thing for amacretin,” Lange said.
Silcibacumab is an anti inflammatory drug and we are currently investigating the potential impact of that in patients with cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease, he informed.
He also revealed that the company will explore how GLP-1 drugs could help patients struggling with addiction.
‘Rare diseases is one of our key focus areas’
Ludovic Helfgott, Executive Vice President, Rare Disease, Novo Nordisk revealed that it’s been more than forty five years we actually started to work in rare disease.
“We work on diseases to fight diseases that could concern one birth every ten, fifteen, twenty thousand. When you talk about hemophilia, we talk about overall a population that is broadly around eight hundred thousand people in the world altogether, and only of them 300,000, three hundred and 50,000 are actually properly treated. So, we’re really talking really for a limited number of patients. But are tackling with a model that we created out of an hybrid between the strength of Novo Nordisk and biotech,” Helfgott informed.
“We have a global reach. We can actually reach people all over the world. We are actually agnostic to which technology platform we’re using. We can do, gene editing, but we can also do, small molecules. We can do monoclonal antibodies. We can do, peptides, and that’s quite unique, and that’s why it’s so singular. That’s why we’re a bit different. We are a bit different, and I like referring to it as a biotech within Novo Nordisk because you have this unique ability to take the breath of Novo Nordisk, but also be focused.”
He also announced that Novo Nordisk will be launching a new class of medicines soon called anti-TFPI mAB which is a rebalancing factor that helps to limit the bleedings for patient of hemophilia with inhibitors.
“…we are coming, hopefully soon, another medicine, medicine called denecimig and we are really aiming at providing patients with hemophilia a with and without inhibitors for a treatment that will help to reduce significantly their bleeds in a very comfortable manner because we’re talking about very small injection, subcutaneous every other month versus an infusion that could be daily today or at best weekly. That’s a real difference,” he said.
In the growth disorders business, Novo Nordisk is also launching a new weekly growth hormone treatment.
The global healthcare company, founded in 1923, has addressed unmet medical needs of people living with a serious chronic disease into innovative medicines and delivery systems, like insulin pens. The company’s disease portfolio includes diabetes, obesity, and rare blood and endocrine diseases.