Eli Lilly Narrows Gap with Novo Nordisk

We've been closely watching. Lilly is narrowing the gap with Novo Nordisk. The sales are coming quite close. I mean, Lilly had 1.2 billion in sales of Bound, which only launched a few months ago, and Novo Nordisk had 1.7 billion in sales of its weight loss drug Wegovy, which they reported yesterday. And Wegovy has been on the market for several years. So Lilly is like really moving fast. Sales are ramping up extremely quickly and we are watching closely to see what happens. I guess the next step for these drugs is I guess an oral. Yeah, but exactly where where are we on that? We're one of the companies saying both companies have been working on pills, which obviously they think could help not only expand the market in the U.S., but expand ex-U.S. because there are certain markets that research has shown prefer pills over shots. Japan is one of them, interestingly. So that's kind of the next step here. Both of the companies are studying these drugs. Novo, though, has had a lot of trouble with supply and particularly making enough of the active ingredient that's used in their drugs. The pill uses the same active ingredient and it uses more of it. So they're kind of struggling right now. They can't really launch that pill until they get a handle on supply. Let's go to the big. Sorry about that. Didn't turn on my mike. Let's go to the big take, because that was quite interesting and it feeds into the whole story. And the title is What it's Like when it was Epic. Takes over an entire town. By the way, Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, great story. Thanks. So, thank you. Because I have I spent a ton of time in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Really know of what you speak. And I send it to a buddy who lives there. She knows half the people in the article. That's really. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Wow. I'm just really curious as to how you found this town. So we worked with the data team on this story, and we got data at the three zip code level. So we're looking at, you know, cities and sort of their surrounding areas. And we were looking all across the country. A few other spots came up like Huntsville, Alabama, and we kind of were digging around to see just if people were talking about the drugs online, you know, if there were doctors in the area that were prescribing them. And we honed in on Bowling Green specifically because Kentucky as a state has the highest concentration of weight loss drug users in the country. So we were like, oh, well, if this city is showing up in our data, this is probably a good a good place to to go and see what's happening. And so started talking to people there and like, you know, it kind of spreads like wildfire. You talk to one person who's on the drugs and they're like, Oh, talk to my friend, talk to my neighbor. They're on the drugs, too. And it just kind of was easy to find people after that. Why is that? Why is it the the use so concentrated in a place like Kentucky? Is that just simply because there's more people there that qualify from a Yeah, I guess, awake perspective, right? I mean, that's a piece of it, which is is actually a good thing. I mean, we hear so much about the drugs in New York and in Hollywood, but when we're looking at actual obesity rates, those aren't the places that have the highest concentration of people with obesity or diabetes. In Kentucky, there are high rates of obesity and diabetes. There's also there were employers, large employers in the area that were covering the drugs so people could get access to them. Bowling Green in particular, is a very middle class area. So when people couldn't get coverage for the drugs, they were willing to pay out of pocket for it. So that kind of made the conditions ripe for these drugs to take off in Bowling Green. When when you write the article, you also talk about the compound drugs, killers. Walk us through what a compound drug is, why it's allowed. And is it legit? Yeah, I mean, that has been a really big thing and a really big part of this weight loss drug market as of recently because, you know, and that fits in with this supply issue. Lilly and Novo have really been struggling to keep up with supply. So when drugs are in shortage, officially these compounding pharmacies are allowed to make similar versions, copycat versions, we call them, to help, you know, patients who are unable to get prescriptions for the drugs. But what's happened is, you know, in this gap, it's kind of allowed these compounding pharmacies to proliferate and not all of them are exactly legitimate. And so there's a lot of medical supplies that are using the compounding drugs. Telehealth companies that are selling the compounding drugs like hims. And hers is one that comes up often. And in Bowling Green, it's really taken off as well. There's like all of these medical supplies popping up, weight loss clinics popping up that are offering compounded or just illegitimate versions of the drugs. And, you know, that's become a big thing there as well. Well, for the compounded drugs, are they are they as effective? Are they safe? What do we know about them? That's kind of the problem, is because, you know, pharmaceutical products are so tightly regulated and require so many studies from these drug makers. But the compounded drugs are not studied and they're not regulated in the same. Why there's not the same FDA oversight. So when we think about are these drugs as effective? The answer is like, we don't really know because we don't have studies that prove that. And definitely why would that ever be allowed? We understand that it's a tight supply shortage. Got it? Got it. But then why is it like, here's an option, Take a drug that you don't really know works? What's in it? Why is it allowed? It's because, I mean, normally, like compounding the reason that it exists is is more on an individual basis. So if a person is allergic to a certain ingredient or like a coloring and a drug compounding pharmacies can, you know, tailor make those drugs for that specific patient, or if a drug is in shortage and and a person can't get access to it, it's not really supposed to be they're not supposed to be acting like drug makers. But that's kind of what we're seeing happening with these weight loss drugs because of the demand for them.