Novo Nordisk, Inc.

iStock, Victor Golmer Novo Nordisk has brought on other cardiometabolic collaborators this year, including United Laboratories International and Deep Apple Therapeutics. Novo Nordisk is looking to add to its obesity pipeline, teaming up with California biotech Replicate Bioscience to design and develop an RNA-based treatment for obesity and diabetes. The partners did not provide a specific financial breakdown in their announcement on Thursday, revealing only that the Danish pharma is putting $550 million on the line, inclusive of an upfront payment and milestone commitments. Replicate will also be entitled to tiered royalties on future product sales. The centerpiece of the partnership is Replicate’s self-replicating RNA platform. This an mRNA construct that includes cellular machinery to make copies of an mRNA therapy after it has been dosed and is inside the cell, with the aim of amplifying the effective therapeutic dose in comparison to traditional mRNA therapies. Such an approach, according to Karina Thorn, corporate vice president of Nucleic Acid Research at Novo, “allows us to create a new avenue for development of novel, impactful therapies.” It is unclear what protein the partners are looking to target. This year so far, Novo has been on a dealmaking spree to deepen its cardiometabolic pipeline. In January, for instance, the pharma expanded its years-long partnership with Valo Health for $190 million upfront plus $4.6 billion in milestones across up to 20 drug programs for obesity, type 2 diabetes and other conditions. Then, in March 2025, Novo bet $2 billion to partner with China’s United Laboratories International, gaining worldwide rights to its triple-G asset UBT251. The drug targets the GLP-1, GIP and glucagon receptors and is currently in early-stage development for obesity. In June, Novo again reached into its purse, taking out $812 million to collaborate with Deep Apple Therapeutics and leverage its proprietary engine for non-incretin oral therapies for obesity. Novo’s investments come amid a difficult first half of the year, with sales of its blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy battered by compounders . Commercial execution has also been suboptimal at the Danish pharma, pushing the company to replace its CEO and lower its full-year sales forecast by 5%. On a year-to-date basis, Novo’s shares have dropped some 44%. In the second quarter, Wegovy brought home 19.5 billion Danish krone  or approximately $3 billion, beating the consensus estimate by 1%.

Analysts expect that upcoming oral obesity drugs from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk will launch in the US at prices similar to injectable blockbusters Wegovy and Zepbound—around $1,000 per month. This breaks with the tradition of premium pricing for new therapies, reflecting strong pressure from patients, insurers, and politicians for affordable access as obesity rates soar. Neither company has revealed final pricing, with Novo’s pill likely to debut later this year and Lilly’s by August 2026. Both stress their goal is to expand patient access, especially for those averse to injections. Analysts say the pills are not more effective than the injectables; for example, Lilly’s orforglipron led to 12.4% weight loss in trials, below the 15% seen with Novo’s daily oral semaglutide and 21% for Lilly’s injection. The oral drugs are expected to fill a market niche rather than replace injections, with pills forecast to reach only a mid-teen percentage of a projected $150 billion global obesity market by 2030. Manufacturing challenges are also in focus: Novo’s oral drug needs 75 times more active ingredient than the injection, raising supply concerns. Both companies are investing heavily to ramp up production. With mounting demand and scrutiny over pricing, the launch of these pills could reshape access and competition in the fast-growing obesity drug sector. Analysts warn that launching above Wegovy’s price could backfire, especially in the expanding cash-pay market.

Investors are souring on the obesity drug field, which was once heralded as the biggest pharmaceutical market of all time. Even as Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy continue to rake in billions of dollars each quarter, there has been a string of recent clinical misses for the next generation of obesity drugs, and that’s prompted some soul-searching among investors. Novo’s CagriSema , Lilly’s oral orforglipron , and most recently, Viking Therapeutics’ candidate have reported results that disappointed investors, who reacted quickly and sharply . Their stock prices are all down drastically since the beginning of 2025, with Novo $NVO and Viking $VKTX down about 35% and Lilly $LLY down about 8%. It’s no surprise, then, that some are moving on from the obesity drug craze of the past few years, according to BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman. Investors are questioning what’s next and how oral medicines fit into the market, he said. “Public investor opinion is evident from market caps,” Stifel banker Tim Opler said in an email. But public investor interest “doesn’t seem to be waning.” The initial success of GLP-1s made Novo the most valuable European company at one point and catapulted Eli Lilly’s market cap close to becoming the first $1 trillion pharmaceutical company. The GLP-1 mechanism has taken the industry by storm, with some projecting the market could be as big as $150 billion by 2035 , and follow-on competitors have appeared in droves. Stifel is tracking 157 obesity assets currently in clinical development. There have been dozens of high-dollar licensing deals in the past two years in a field that was ghosted by nearly every large pharma company. Yet concerns persist. “We are not optimistic about the prospects for many pipeline projects in today’s emerging obesity market,” Stifel bankers wrote in a July report . “This is because (1) Lilly has a dominant portfolio and (2) semaglutide, a very good drug, will be generic in roughly five years. But the good news is that many opportunities remain to upend the market with new approaches.” Meanwhile, private funding for obesity drug developers has plateaued. There were two high-profile launches early this year: Verdiva Bio’s $411 million debut and Versant’s Helicore Biopharma breaking cover with $65 million . But there was only one private fundraise in the second quarter, signifying a “lull in obesity financings,” according to Oppenheimer bankers. It was a $33 million round that went to a Bob Langer-affiliated startup called Syntis Bio . There are “so many bets on the table right now,” Opler said, and so the bar is “really high” for new entrants. His team said obesity biotechs brought in $979 million in venture funding last year, up from $638 million in 2021, the year that Wegovy was first approved. Third Rock Ventures is intrigued by the space, according to partner Jeffrey Tong, and it has supported companies like Septerna that have gone on to add obesity drugs to their pipelines and forge partnerships with obesity leaders like Novo. But the biotech incubator has yet to form an obesity-focused startup. “As we think about company creation, we have to ask ourselves the question, ‘What does the world need five years, 10 years from now?’” Tong said in an interview. If Third Rock were to build an obesity biotech, it would have to offer a clear improvement on Zepbound and Wegovy. This means medicines that are not only effective, but also tolerable, convenient, “compatible with everyday life” and chronic care, muscle-sparing and broadly scalable, Tong said. Deep Apple Therapeutics CEO Spiros Liras also believes that durability and tolerability are key focal points of next-gen medicines. “The differentiation between 23% and 21% [weight loss], for me, is meaningless at this point of time,” Liras said Thursday. Deep Apple is working on various drugs for obesity, including an MC4R agonist. At least one of its obesity assets is slated to enter the clinic next year, he said. Some companies like Omega Funds-backed Ousia Pharma are still investing in obesity but keeping quiet about their plans. “We’re being quite timid or discreet, if you will, just because we want to wrap up some pretty interesting new experiments of which we’ve already seen very good data before we disclose IP and all that,” Omega founder Otello Stampacchia said last month . “People can leapfrog quite quickly, particularly with small molecules and so on.”