Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has become Europe’s most valuable company by market capitalization, surpassing luxury giant LVMH, thanks to its new drug Wegovy, a self-injectable weight-loss medication. Novo went public in 2009 and has multiplied its price 42 times, so that its stock market value (446 billion euros) now exceeds the GDP of its native country.
Launched in the United States in 2021, and with sales that already exceed 14.5 billion euros, Wegovy’s success has been driven by famous consumers such as Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, or the Kardashian sisters. Francisco Pajuelo, medical director of Novo Nordisk Spain, explains that in Europe it has been marketed since 2023 in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom. In Spain, he is negotiating with the health authorities to sell it “as soon as possible.”
“Novo Nordisk is an example for the European pharmacy: a company that has managed to transform its R&D model and become global,” says Sergi Trilla, president of the consulting firm Trifermed and business director of Veru. Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, president of Novo since 2017, opted to create an innovation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the capital of global biomedical innovation. “He has united Novo’s 100 years of knowledge and experience with the American innovative ecosystem, as an investor and in some projects, remaining as a marketer.” In this collaborative innovation approach, Trilla explains, it has focused on the therapeutic areas in which it was already strong: growth disorders, blood disorders, obesity and diabetes (the company was one of the first to produce insulin in 1923). “They are the diseases of the future, because in the world we are getting fatter and older,” remembers Trilla.
Obesity is the epidemic of our time: it is estimated to affect 2.6 billion people worldwide. In Spain, Francisco Pajuelo points out, “it is a chronic pathology that affects one in five adults,” but the percentage of the overweight population reaches 70% in the United States. It has become a public health problem that, in the United States alone, generated a direct health cost of more than 200 billion dollars. “Even at higher prices than current ones, these drugs would have a good cost-benefit ratio for the system,” says Alex Gold, a Fidelity fund manager. Treatment with Wegovy costs more than $10,000 per year in the United States, while in the United Kingdom the company has reached an agreement for public health to finance it for 140 euros/month, although limiting its indications. In Spain, Pajuelo pointed out, negotiations are still taking place with the health authorities to set the price.
Wegovy, with a weekly injection, provides a feeling of satiety so that by incorporating some exercise and healthy food, patients lose between 15% and 17% of their weight in 68 weeks. Its sales success has led the group to have supply problems and delay its launch in many countries.
Novo will soon have a competitor for its star drug: the American pharmaceutical company Lilly has a drug in phase three that gives similar results and could be approved this year in the US. It is also injectable, like Novo’s, but both companies They are developing it in tablets, which would increase its potential market, which today is estimated at 30 billion dollars in the United States.
The Danish company, however, has an advantage over Lilly: the latest clinical trials show that Wegovy reduces the risk of adverse cardiovascular events in obese patients by 20%. “People with obesity are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but to date, there are no approved weight management medications that have been shown to provide effective weight control while reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death,” recalled Martin Holst Lange, executive vice president of the Danish group when presenting the study. In fact, until now, the adverse effects of this type of drug have been what has stopped its consumption for millions of people for whom being overweight is more of an aesthetic problem than a health problem.
