Weight-loss drugs may
eventually reach only about 50 per cent 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 per cent 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 US 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 US market in January and had 3,071 US prescriptions in
the first four days after its launch.
PRODUCTION RAMP ‘EXPENSIVE AND SLOW’
Ricks said ramping up production to meet even a 50 per cent market
cap would take time. He figured 50 per cent 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.