Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk has become Europe’s most valuable company by market capitalization, ahead of luxury giant LVMH, thanks to its new drug, Wegovy, a self-injectable weight loss drug. Novo went public in 2009 and has multiplied its price 42 times, so that its stock market value (446,000 million euros) already exceeds the GDP of its native country.
Launched in the United States in 2021, and with sales already exceeding 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 España, explains that in Europe it will be marketed from 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 European pharmacy: a company that has been able to transform its R&D model and become global”, says Sergi Trilla, president of the consultancy Trifermed and business director of Veru. Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, president of Novo since 2017, decided to create an innovation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the capital of global biomedical innovation. “He has combined Novo’s 100 years of knowledge and experience with the American innovative ecosystem as an investor, and in some projects he has stayed on as a marketer.” In this collaborative innovation approach, explains Trilla, 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 that it affects 2.6 billion people worldwide. In Spain, points out Francisco Pajuelo, “it is a chronic pathology that affects one in five adults”, but the percentage of the overweight population reaches up to 70% in the United States. It has become a public health problem that, in the United States alone, generated a direct health care cost of more than $200 billion. “Even at higher prices than the 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 dollars 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 delimiting its indications. In Spain, Pajuelo pointed out, negotiations are still underway 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 eating, patients lose between 15% and 17% of their weight in 68 weeks. The sales success has led the group to have supply problems and to 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 the two firms are developing it in tablets, which would increase its potential market, which today is estimated at $30 billion in the US.
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%. “Obese people are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but to date, there are no approved weight management drugs that have been shown to provide effective weight control while reducing the risk of heart attack, cerebrovascular accident or cardiovascular death,” recalled Martin Holst Lange, executive vice president of the Danish group, when he presented the study. In fact, until now, the adverse effects of this type of drug have been the ones that have stopped their consumption for millions of people, for whom overweight is more of an aesthetic problem than a health problem.
