LONDON (Reuters) – Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen spoke at a Reuters Newsmaker event on Friday. Below are some quotes from his interview which focused on the company’s hugely popular Wegovy weight-loss drug.
ON RISING OBESITY RATES
“The growth of obesity is really linked to how we live today. If one reflects on how each one of us moves around in society today, compared to our childhood, I remember how I got on my bike in the morning, went to school. I feel guilty about having taken my kids in the car more.
“I was in China last week, and it dawned on me how that has also changed a lot compared to when I visited for the first time some 20, 30 years back, where there were a lot of bikes on the road. Today, there are a lot of cars. The bikes have been replaced by electrical bikes or scooters.”
“… It’s important to understand that this is a complex disease, it’s not just about what you eat and how you exercise, there’s a genetic component that plays into people developing body weight and obesity in different ways, but there’s also a socio-economic dimension to it, and I think it’s important that we look at obesity in a more comprehensive way, and typically diet and exercise comes together with the medical treatment.”
ON TRIAL RESULTS AND PATIENT FEEDBACK
“We just released the headline data of the cardiovascular outcomes trial where we show that we reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 20%, so these are very meaningful health benefits.
“And add to that, of course, what it also means for the individual living with obesity, sometimes meaning that you are less active in society, perhaps less active in the workforce, and governments also look at this as a trend that is potentially reducing the number of active people in the workforce, and with aging populations it’s actually very meaningful to reverse those trends and have more people who can be active in the workforce and become taxpayers instead of consumers of healthcare.””I’ve had conversations with some of those who participated in the clinical trial where they tell me about that for the first time, they actually feel that they get control of their life back. They’re no longer obsessed by snacking, the next meal … They feel they can leave their home, they can leave the refrigerator. They can go out and be socially active.”
“We just did the SELECT data, the SELECT study, which is now also part of the evidence (for this class of medicines). And we do not think that there is, say, a correlation between using these medicines and increased risk of suicidal or any of the other safety concerns that have been described.”
ON NOVO’S ROLLOUT STRATEGY IN EUROPE
“… Our aim is to try to make deals with healthcare systems. And of course, it’s a bit different from country to country. In Europe, where it’s typically government-funded healthcare, we would aim to seek reimbursement for those patients who have the highest BMI, have co-morbidities, and are perhaps also less fortunate from a socioeconomic point of view. Because we believe that there will probably be no country that will be able to fund care for everybody living with obesity.”
“So … the German launch is not a launch where we’re trying to get to each and every person with obesity, but it’s one where we’re trying to get in and work with the healthcare system and be part of this (government-designed) obesity programme to really show … that by doing that, we can actually get to the patients who need the medicine the most and try to solve a real healthcare challenge together with the government.”
“When we launched initially in the U.S., we saw a very, very strong uptake. We then tried to launch in Denmark and Norway, which are much smaller markets, but we saw again a very, very steep uptake. Now we’re trying to launch into a larger market where we try to get into the healthcare system. So you can see this as an attempt to test out different commercial strategies because we can see that the demand for the medicine is so strong that we actually have to be more intentional in how we actually get to the patients.”
“This is not just about weight, it’s actually about health and significantly improving health outcomes for these people. And when you look at who are the patients consuming healthcare costs, you’ll see that people struggling with obesity among those who consume the highest cost in healthcare systems. And by addressing that, we actually take the burden off the healthcare system.”
“… Obviously, we are constrained on volumes now. So it’s not that we are in a massive launch mode, we will be launching in more and more countries…
“… Actually coming in a proactive manner and trying to constrain some of these launches and finding ways, which is different from country to country, to make sure that we target our launches, I think works for the healthcare systems. And it also works for us because it means that we are establishing obesity as a real disease with serious health benefits when we address those patients. And that will, of course, then generate savings in the system. So over time, you can gradually expand to more and more patients as we also ramp up manufacturing.”
ON SUPPLY
“I would say that this is a very unusual situation to be in for a pharmaceutical company, because typically when you launch medicines, you have a relatively well-defined population that you’re going to serve …
In the case of obesity, we’re dealing with perhaps a billion patients around the world. Some of the countries we talk about, you have perhaps half of the population being in principle patients and customers.”
“(When) we launched our latest innovation, we saw that physicians had actually piled patients up. Patients were really mobilized, and we also saw that payers were willing to pay. So we saw a dramatic shift in the demand curves we had experienced in the past.”
“We are ramping up manufacturing. We are adding lines more or less on an ongoing basis, and we’ll keep doing that for the coming years. But it’s not unlikely that we’ll actually be in a situation where, as people become aware of this opportunity, the number of people who are struggling with weight, they become mobilized … So I think for the foreseeable future, we’ll have a situation where demand will be larger than what we can supply.”
“We start the year with one external contract manufacturing line. We’ll start next year perhaps with three of those lines, we’re also investing …
“We’re producing a lot, and a lot more each and every day. So there’s a massive ramp up. All our sites are running 24-7.”
(Compiled by Catherine Evans; Editing by Mark Potter)
