Peter Loftus

The one thing that's changing, and I guess you could call this a risk for investors but maybe good for consumers, is that the pricing has been coming down in a pretty remarkable way.

These drugs started with list price of $1,000 a month or above.

Now they're coming down to as low as $149 a month.

That big price reduction is going to put a damper on overall sales, so much so that some analysts have actually reduced their estimates of the overall market size for obesity drugs.

Novo Nordisk is actually predicting its overall sales will decline this year.

So the companies have basically accepted this trade-off of price for volume.

Let's switch gears.

There was a lot of concern the first few months of the year that Johnson & Johnson would really take market share with not only its new pill, but also another injectable drug.

But it turned out that AbbVie's autoimmune drugs, they had solid sales growth for this past quarter.

And in fact, it was better than expected.

AbbVie actually raised its sales guidance for its two main autoimmune drugs, Skyrizzy and Renvoke.

Certainly J&J, you can't count them out because they've also been a strong leader in autoimmune drugs.

But I think that there's a sense that AbbVie will be okay.

Thanks for having me.

Well, what changed was a lot of investment by the Chinese government as well as

private investors in China to really make a priority of building up this biotech, biopharma ecosystem that placed a lot more emphasis on more cutting-edge research so that they could produce these companies, these startups that were coming up with new drugs for different diseases that were really innovative and much more so than had been the case in the

innovation spectrum.

Drugs have become a lot more complex over the last 20 years or so.

And so you have much more innovative ways of trying to combat disease using drugs like biologics, which are basically like drugs that are made in living cells and have proteins and are really much more targeted to a disease than the way drugs were made in the past.

That's the kind of thing that China is doing more of.