By Leah Douglas
WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) – Weight-loss drugs may eventually reach only about 50% of the overweight and obese people who could benefit from them due to complexities of healthcare systems and financial constraints, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said at a conference on Friday.
Lilly and rival Novo Nordisk have been competing for share in the global market for wildly popular GLP-1 injectable and oral weight-loss drugs, which analysts see topping $100 billion per year in the next decade.
Today, just 1 in 10 people who are overweight or obese are using GLP-1s, Ricks said at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington.
“It’s never going to be a hundred,” he said. “For institutional reasons in healthcare and some other complexities in managing health, it’s never going to be that high.”
Ricks pointed to low-cost statins, the most commonly prescribed cholesterol medicines, as a comparable example. “Between 40 and 50% of people who should be on them, are on them. I think of that as maybe a ceiling,” he said.
Lilly’s just-launched weight-loss pill Foundayo was prescribed 1,390 times in the U.S. in its first week of sales, according to analysts who cited IQVIA data.
The pill will compete with Novo’s oral Wegovy, which entered the U.S. market in January and had 3,071 U.S. prescriptions in the first four days after its launch.
PRODUCTION RAMP ‘EXPENSIVE AND SLOW’
Ricks said ramping up production to meet even a 50% market cap would take time. He figured 50% of weight-loss drug candidates globally to be about 500 million people.
“Today we’re treating 21 or 22 million,” the CEO said. “So, can we basically 20-fold that production? Not anytime soon.”
“It will take a long time to do that. There is no real efficiency gain left, we’ve just got to put in more units of capacity. And we will do that, but that capex rollout is expensive and slow,” he said.
Foundayo offers convenience to consumers who may not want to take an injectable GLP-1, Ricks said.
Obesity medicine specialists told Reuters that Americans were interested in GLP-1 pills as a lower-cost, needle-free alternative to injectables like Lilly’s Zepbound.
Price remains a key consideration for many potential GLP-1 patients, as the drugs are still cost prohibitive to most people, the doctors said.
The self-pay price for the lowest dose of GLP-1 pills and injectables ranges from $149 to $349 per month.
“The history has been, it’s really been for people with means and not for people without means,” Ricks acknowledged, “and I think we need to change that.
“I think it’s a moral imperative, but also it’s a cost imperative. Obesity flows with poverty,” Ricks said.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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