United States: The continuous increase in demand for weight loss drugs is leading to a shortage in supply, due to which many patients cannot find injectable treatments.
Norvo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the major weight-loss drug firms, have acknowledged that the supply issues are expected to persist for some time more, as the demand for those medicines keeps rising.
Nevertheless, both companies are making satisfactory developments as far as the projects to enhance output are concerned.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Louise Chen talked about the supply issue, “I think it’s going to take a few years for it to resolve itself,” and “But I think both companies will slowly start to meet the demand in the market.”
Why the weight loss drugs in high demand?
The number of patients turning to weight loss drugs like Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly as these drugs help people to lose significant weight over time.
Although the drugs are expensive, patients have a mix of insurance coverage and also experience few unpleasant side effects.
Obesity estimates leading to weight loss medicines boom in the US
According to Goldman Sachs analysts’ estimates- the number of US adults on obesity medications will reach 15 million by 2030
Some projections made by Wall Street analysts foresee that the market for weight loss drugs will be worth as much as a hundred billion US dollars by the end of the decade.
Given the increased demand, most of the drugs are subject to intermittent shortage situations. Hence there is insufficient information about the extent of shortages involved or the amount of supply at companies’ disposal.
However, both Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly provided positive supply developments on the updates to the investors in a week since then. To close out 2023, they added a few more investments to expand manufacturing capacity for their diabetic products and weight loss drugs.
Such initiatives are made to provide investors an opportunity to have financial gains on the success of the treatments and to give patients an opportunity to access the treatments.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly will seek to retain their dominance in the market as other companies such as Amgen, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Roche, and other smaller obesity drugmakers are eager to enter the space to compete.
Rise in supply expected in 2024
Novo Nordisk last week said that it had more than doubled the supply of the low-dose versions of its weight-loss injection Wegovy in January compared to previous months, thereby allowing more people to start the drug. Novo Nordisk has tightened access to the lower “starter” doses in the USA since May due to the shortages.
There is still “limited availability” of Wegovy for 0.25, 0.5, 1, and 1.7-milligram doses on the Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortage database, based on the data shared on Monday.
In general, patients start with the 0.25-milligram dose and increase gradually in order to reduce side effects like nausea.
Novo Nordisk has planned to gradually ramp up the Wegovy supply for the rest of this year, and its executives mentioned this in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call last week.
Shortage in other drugs supply recorded- FDA
Some US pharmacies also have limited supplies of certain doses of Mounjaro from Eli Lilly, another diabetes drug that is structured around the same active ingredient as Zepbound, according to the FDA.
Both these therapies are incretin drugs since they resemble gut hormones to suppress appetite and for the regulation of blood glucose levels.
By the end of 2023, Eli Lilly achieved its goal of taking production capacity twice for such kinds of incretin drugs, as said by the executives in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday,
According to them, the company is expected to grow production with “equal urgency” in the current year, along with the most important rise happening in the second half of the year.
By the end, the expectation by the company’s production of sellable doses of incretin drugs would be a minimum of 1.5 times higher as compared to the second half of 2023, as said by the executives.
Long-term supply expected by new manufacturing plants
Billions have been spent by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly in building new manufacturing plants which could help boost the supply of weight loss and diabetes drugs in the years to come.
By Eli Lilly, a new plant in Concord, North Carolina would be starting production of incretin drugs by the end of this year, including the shipment of products meant to be exported by 2025.
Alternative forms of drugs available
Such forms help in boosting the supply of drugs. Eli Lilly’s limited capacity in manufacturing autoinjectors for Mounjaro and Zepbound made the company plan to launch Mounjaro in a delivery device called KwikPen in certain countries outside of the US.
Moreover, they also announced launching KwikPen forms of its incretin drugs, which would help in expanding the supply. It is because, for years Eli Lily used the device for insulin, therefore tapping into current manufacturing resources by the company would help in making more of incretin drugs.