Novo Nordisk (Ozempic)

All right, first episode back. Let's see if I can do this sleep-deprived. [laughing]

[laughing] Oh, you and me both, Ben. [laughing] Oh.

Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Hmm. Is it you, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

Welcome to Season Fourteen, Episode One of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

I'm David Rosenthal.

And we are your hosts. Today's episode is on the company behind the sensational diabetes and weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy. The company is Novo Nordisk. Now, when I first learned about Ozempic a few years ago, I thought, "Of course, this is gonna be amazing for a lot of people and could also completely destroy the market for insulin. Those insulin companies better watch out." But here is the fascinating thing, listeners: Novo Nordisk is the company behind insulin, or at least one of the few big ones. Now, you might say, "Well, that's okay, 'cause they're probably a big pharmaceutical company that's, you know, very diversified with lots of different drugs."

Nope.

No. Novo Nordisk is unique in that the vast majority of their revenue is concentrated in the category of metabolic health. They have been the insulin and diabetes company for the last one hundred years, and perhaps even more surprising, this pharma giant is unique in that they are owned and controlled by a non-profit foundation. The stats around weight, diabetes, and its impact on our society are staggering. There are thirty-eight million Americans with diabetes. That's one in ten people. Globally, that number is over five hundred million with the disease. Diabetes costs the US alone more than three hundred and twenty-seven billion dollars a year, and on the other side of things, in the weight category, around a billion people suffer from obesity worldwide. A billion, including forty percent of the US population. If you expand that from obesity to overweight, seventy-five percent of Americans are technically overweight. It is really hard to imagine a bigger market to go after, which is why Novo Nordisk has become Europe's largest company, surpassing even LVMH last year, David.

Yeah, it's wild. I mean, there are no other disease and drug categories besides diabetes and obesity, that this could be possible to have a company of this size, to have a pharma giant pretty much just focused on this one area. Like, this is the Hermès of the pharma industry.

Yeah. So why is today, in the early twenty twenties, the moment in human history for these new GLP-1 drugs? The crazy thing is, semaglutide, the molecule in Ozempic and Wegovy, was pioneered back by Novo Nordisk with the first trial in 2008 for Type 2 diabetes treatment, and it was built on research started in the early nineties. But here we are in 2023, almost three decades later, talking about it as a weight loss drug that sort of magically appeared out of nowhere, or that's at least the public perception of it. Incredibly, the fact that GLP-1 drugs could be used to reduce food intake was actually discovered way back in the mid-nineties, in the first sort of scientific publication about it, but only in 2021 did we finish the clinical trials that truly show how effective it can be.