The weight-loss drug market is booming in the wake of Ozempic’s success, and China is preparing its own drugs to compete with offerings from Western pharmaceutical companies, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday.
Analysts reportedly see Eli Lilly’s Zepbound as the current frontrunner in the weight loss drug race. Ozempic is the best-known brand name, but that particular version of the semaglutide drug family is meant for diabetes patients. Ozempic’s sister product for general public use is called Wegovy, and it quickly lost market share to Zepbound.
Disappointing sales of Wegovy, coupled with some unsuccessful trials for next-generation products, drove stock prices for Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy, down enough to prompt its longstanding CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen to step down on Friday. The Danish pharmaceutical company is girding itself for renewed battle in a highly competitive market that could be worth over $150 billion worldwide in five years.
Many other drug companies want a piece of that action, including big names in China’s scandal-plagued pharmaceutical industry. Hong Kong Association for the Study of Obesity President Fancis Chow Chun-chung told the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Monday he sees “plenty of candidates in the pipeline,” and expects “three to five more drugs in this category to be approved within five years.”
Chow noted demand for obesity drugs is skyrocketing in Hong Kong but supplies are tight because prescriptions for the existing Western-made drugs are tightly controlled. The cost of even Eli Lilly’s slightly cheaper products remains very high for Asian consumers, so Chow saw an opportunity for lower-cost competitors to grab market share in the region.
First out of the gate could be Mazdutide, a new product from Hong Kong’s Innovent Biologics. The company anticipates receiving approval for both diabetes and weight-management drugs by the end of this year. Innovent has a licensing agreement with Eli Lilly to help get it off the ground.
“We anticipate manufacturers’ focus on Asia’s obesity market will grow, particularly in China and Japan, where penetration is low and innovation continues to emerge,” market analyst Thibault Boutherin predicted.
Asia is expected to see the fastest growth in demand for obesity drugs over the next few years, in part because market penetration by the big-name Western drugs has been relatively low.
Prices for the drugs are coming down, while each new generation has been almost twice as effective as the one before it. The first obesity drugs released at the turn of the millennium produced around five percent weight loss, while the third generation – which officially began with Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy – can produce 20 percent or more.
Some analysts think Chinese companies might be able to jump into the market with faster approval for next-generation obesity drugs than Western competitors. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is putting weight loss drugs under increasing scrutiny as their popularity explodes and more products rush to the market.
China’s current obesity rate is lower than America’s, but the vast size of the Chinese population means it has roughly the same number of people who meet the body mass index (BMI) definition of clinical obesity and it has the largest number of overweight people in the world. Chinese women want to be thin, and beauty influencers are already telling them to try Ozempic, if they can get their hands on it.
The pent-up demand in China is so great that Novo Nordisk’s plan to turn its fortunes around includes gaining approval for Wegovy from Chinese drug regulators as quickly as possible. Eli Lilly is also queued up to gain approval for its Tirzepatide product.
They might both be beaten to the punch by Innovent Biologics and Hangzhou Jiuyuan Gene Engineering, which has applied for swift approval of its domestically-produced rival to Ozempic. Another Chinese company, Huadong Medicine, has been working for years to get Novo Nordisk’s patent for Ozempic overturned in China so it can rush out its own copycat product.
One reason to believe China’s weight-loss drug market is primed to explode is that Chinese consumers are very comfortable buying their drugs through e-commerce platforms. They already buy products like Ozempic online without prescriptions, along with numerous counterfeit products, creating a massive “grey market” for the drugs. Chinese officials have been cracking down on the grey market over the past year, shutting down some of the dodgier counterfeit products and clearing the way for legitimate sales of drugs with regulatory approval to soar.
The weight loss drug market is so huge that it has a significant diplomatic dimension. The authoritarian Chinese government could easily wave its regulatory magic wand and grant decisive advantages to Chinese companies, but Beijing is worried about scaring away foreign investors.
Premier Li Qiang has spent his two years in office laboring to convince the world that China is “open for business.” As Huadong Medicine’s years-long quest to nullify Ozempic’s patent protection illustrates, knocking the Western pioneers of weight loss drugs out of the vast Chinese market is a step the Chinese Communist Party seems reluctant to take.
Read the full article here