TheChek News Flow

Danish drugmaker is racing to beat arch-rival Eli Lilly to market

Novo Nordisk’s anti obesity pill has delivered almost as much weight loss as its Wegovy injectable in a new trial, as the Danish drugmaker races to beat arch-rival Eli Lilly to market with a tablet version of its blockbuster drug.

Patients taking Wegovy in pill form lost 16.6 per cent of their body weight over a 64-week phase 3 trial, just under the 17 per cent that patients taking the injection lost on average in a previous study. One in three participants taking the pill lost 20 per cent of their body weight. 

Ludovic Helfgott, Novo’s executive vice-president of product and portfolio strategy, said it was the first time that an oral and injectable weight-loss drug had been more or less at par. 

One problem with making the drug in tablet form is that the peptides — small strings of amino acids — in its active ingredient semaglutide are mostly broken down in the gut and do not make it into the bloodstream. Novo has added a compound that makes it easier for the drug to be absorbed in the stomach. 

Helfgott said the company was “increasingly convinced of the importance of an oral” to offer patients another way to take weight-loss drugs. “A few years ago it was deemed impossible to put a peptide in a pill,” he added. 

Novo has lost ground to Lilly in the key US market, while investors have become concerned that its pipeline of next generation weight-loss drugs is not as comprehensive. Its shares are down 60 per cent in the past year. 

Its obesity pill could help it win back market share. A decision on whether the US Food and Drug Administration will approve the drug is expected in the fourth quarter, whereas Lilly is slightly further behind in the process, with analysts expecting a decision from regulators next year.

Lilly has taken a different approach to its weight-loss pill, developing orforglipron from scratch with a compound it bought from Japan’s Chugai Pharmaceutical.

Results of the first major trial of orforglipron for obesity sent shares in Lilly down last month, after it reported average weight loss at the lower end of market expectations. The trial is not directly comparable to the latest Novo study.

Novo hopes that because the Wegovy pill has the same active ingredient as the injectable version, regulators and doctors will recognise the broader health benefits of both. Previous trials have found that injectable Wegovy causes a steep fall in the risk of serious cardiac events. 

Martin Holst Lange, Novo’s chief scientific officer, said semaglutide had “well established cardiovascular benefits”. 

Trial participants taking the Wegovy pill experienced similar side effects to those taking the injectable, with nausea and vomiting the most common problems.

Separately on Wednesday, Lilly published data showing orforglipron outperformed oral semaglutide for treating type 2 diabetes in a head to head trial.

Our long international nightmare may soon be over. Both China and the U.S. seem to be in agreement about the terms under which TikTok U.S. will be sold to a new company majority-owned by Americans, judging by a statement overnight from a Chinese government official. We don’t know the details, including the full investor lineup in the new TikTok, whether the U.S. government will take a stake (as Trump earlier this year suggested should happen) or the price being paid. A longer-term question is how the new U.S.-only version of TikTok will fare as a business.

In sheer revenue terms, TikTok America (as the company was to be called as of earlier this year) is likely to be second among social media firms to Meta in revenue, well ahead of other social media firms like Snap, Pinterest, X and Reddit. That’s based on our report in April that TikTok parent ByteDance’s international revenue—primarily TikTok—rose 63% to $39 billion in 2024. Even if TikTok only accounts for $30 billion of that, the U.S. version seems likely to be the majority of that.

The U.S. is the world’s biggest ad market and accounts for the majority of the revenue of smaller social media firms. (One wild card is TikTok’s shopping business, which may be more international). Even so, it seems reasonable to think TikTok America is at least a $20 billion-a-year revenue business. In comparison, Snap generated $5.4 billion last year, while Pinterest was even smaller.

TikTok’s ad business should be able to grow quickly, once the longstanding uncertainty about its future disappears. What we don’t know is the company’s profitability. Our past reporting on ByteDance’s finances suggested that, at least in 2023, TikTok was nowhere close to turning a profit. That could have changed in 2024, given the top-line growth. But there are a few variables that could affect the profitability of the new U.S.-only TikTok. One is the likelihood that TikTok will have to staff up, not only to make up for people leaving amid the uncertainty over the past year, but also to replace functions previously handled by ByteDance. That could raise its expenses.

Another variable which could affect TikTok’s business prospects is its relationship with the U.S. government. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump said the government should get a stake in TikTok as a condition of allowing it to stay alive. That doesn’t look as outlandish as it might have a few months ago, given that the government is now a shareholder in Intel. Still, the idea of the government being a shareholder in one of the main sources of news for many Americans is likely to raise some eyebrows. Perhaps Trump will settle for a revenue share, as he’s arranged with Nvidia for its Chinese AI chip revenue. We reported earlier this year that some bidders for TikTok had discussed giving the government a 50% revenue share—that seems like a lot!—or half of the proceeds from a future sale.

How this plays out will likely be a big issue for investors in the new company, expected to include Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. Surely they don’t want to cripple TikTok’s chances of making money by splitting its revenue with the government—unless their participation is just a way to suck up to Trump. Nowadays, one never knows.