Mike Doustdar Talks Strong Demand for Weight Loss Pills
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So we spoke in December after you were granted U.S. approval to launch your obesity pill. This month, in January, the first drug maker to do so. I know it's early, but what has uptake looked like so far? It's been really exciting to launch, and I think when you go around this Congress and hear the excitement externally, we are of course objective, but externally everyone being excited about it gives you a good feeling. The uptake has been good, but it's really early days for me to go into the details of it. It really speaks to the fact that we also spoke earlier, there's been a lot of people that are excited about GLP-1 category, weight loss, but did not want to take an injection. There's the taboo of injection, there's needle phobia, and they've been waiting.
So we are super excited that we're finally having an offering for this large group of people that have been wanting a pill. And critically, you have a couple months here when it comes to Eli Lilly. They're slated to get approval sometime in the next couple months. How do you prevent your patients from switching to Lilly's pill, which I understand doesn't have exactly the same food restrictions as yours does, once that is on the market? A couple of points. When we started actually deciding how to go into the oral segment and decided that we should put our protein and peptide and encapsulate it and take that route, most people thought that this is going to be impossible. Scientifically, you don't find examples of large protein peptides going inside orally and not being dissolved by the enzymes of your stomach.
We were able to do that magically, I would say. But now, of course, we're getting the fruits of that. We have, for the first time, the efficacy of our pill at 16.6% when you take the drug being exactly equal to the pen version of it, the Vigo V-Pen, again at 16.6%. That, of course, is second to none. When you take a look at the data from all of our competition in late pipeline or early pipeline, no one has that efficacy. That, I think, is a big leap that we will talk to. Not least, of course, Vigo, Vipil also have the CV benefits that our competition does not have at this point. So I'm incredibly excited. grateful for that. Now you talked about restrictions. I think there's a lot of drugs that have restrictions, including our own diabetes version of this called Rebelses, where we have one and a half million patients on the product and not complaining whatsoever about that restrictions.
We have this simple saying of sip and go. So I'm very thankful that we basically have been able to prove that on the market with Rebelses, and I'm very optimistic that Vigovipil will show the same. Let's talk a little bit about production of the pill, because you think about the amount that you need of the drug ingredient for the pill versus the shots.
How did Novo Nordisk describe initial uptake of the new Wegovy pill in the U.S.?
How profitable is it to make and produce the pills versus the shots? Well, if we could not make any financial gains or profits out of it, then we probably would not have launched it. So we have made a couple of things very clear. Again, it comes back to the skepticism that Going the peptide route orally is the wrong one because no one else has done it. That people first and foremost started telling us it's not scientifically possible when we prove that right. Then they started focusing, well, can you produce enough of it and is it profitable? And we basically tell people that we have produced more than enough of it.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:32
2
How did Novo Nordisk describe initial uptake of the new Wegovy pill in the U.S.?
3:32–6:25
3
Why do some patients prefer a pill over injectable GLP-1 weight loss treatments?
6:25–12:54
4
How does Novo Nordisk compare its oral pill efficacy to the injectable version and competitors?
12:54–12:56
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Bloomberg Talks
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