Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1,000 appetite suppressant can be made for just $5
Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1,000 appetite suppressant can be made for just $5
article doesnt present any pressure they are facing. also
Drug production costs are often shrouded in secrecy with little clarity on how they relate to prices, if at all.
Prices are never about cost, its what people are willing to pay. Which gets brutally exploited by pharmaceutical industry.
To be fair, drug development is pretty expensive. A lot of the budgets for it are public-because it happens at public institutions.
obviously
anybody who believes pharma costs are justified by materials is... well, let's just call them uninformed. It's not justified by R&D costs or production issues. It's justified by the stock market, by the CEO having a race with other pharma CEOs for the biggest bonus, and by no other thing.
I work in med device, close to pharma, but a bit different. There is a lot of overhead. Beyond all the validations required for startup of each line, there is quite a lot of Sustaining work.
I'm not trying to defend this price, or the gouging that pharma does regularly. But I don't think the $5 price includes all the overhead of the QMS.
It's justified by asking "how much money can we suck out of the people it helps?"
I'm sure there are some costs associated with developing drugs, and I'm sure it's not cheap.
The problem still stands, though, and the solution is capping executive pay in public companies.
Novo Nordisk's CEO was paid $9.8 million last year, inclusive of bonus and benefits.
The R&D is often publicly funded by research grants, with free labor by grad students. Our tax dollars are paying for extortion over our health in this completely broken system.
As you pointed out, this is literally just sociopathic CEOs doing what capitalism demands of them.
Normally you can think of these prices as the reward to taking a risk. The chance of developing a drug and bringing it to market is usually small, and the reward should accordingly be high. However, in the particular case of Ozempic, the company attempted to develop a diabetes drug, and accidentally found that the drug works against obesity. That means that the reward in this case outweighs the risk by an obscene amount.
Your starting premise relies on the idea that the costs associated with making drugs are justified. In essence, this implies that the insane rewards are justified because risks associated with not producing a drug are so high.
Most of our science is funded via taxes and controlled by the government, given to researchers through grants that are awarded based on merit as determined by their peers. We've developed an adjacent system where drug discovery is funded by capital and investments from non-scientists based on the idea that "striking gold" in the medical world could make them rich.
Why not just remove the cost-barrier to entry? Require all drug discovery to be funded through grants like other research? Pay people working on drugs whether they discovered a new drug or not, as long as they provided proof of their efforts? Researchers would not need to please those with money (banks, investors) to give them funds for a drug, and so would be free to work on drugs that have a low likelihood of being profitable (such as for forgotten illnesses, or using cheap and widely available medicines in novel ways). And when an amazing drug was discovered, our society would be free to use it efficiently and at-cost, since there wouldn't be stakeholders hungry for their massive payout.
The grant system is a mess, also. And in an ideal world those whose ideas and research led to amazing discoveries would be rewarded extensically somehow, both with appreciation and a reasonable amount of money (the staff of an entire research organization could be set financially for life for a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount of money we shovel over to pharmaceutical company stakeholders). And all of this is also tied up in the clinical medical industrial complex, with all its own neuroses.
So there are barriers to implementing something like this... But holy shit do I hear this idea a lot, that high risk justifies the insane rewards. I think it's bogus!
Most of the research on drugs is done by universities with grant money or government labs and then the production is sold to private companies. They aren’t taking nearly the amount of risk you are claiming.
Double pop! First time I've seen a privacy popup on top of a privacy popup. The top one you can only accept.
Extra privacy wow!
Ah I see they are going the Roku route.
Well you see… there’s the yacht, the yacht they have to land the helicopter, and the smallish yacht they use to go into port because berths at dock are hard to come by.
Oh and the. There’s the helicopter, the pilots, the mansion in every state. Except, uh, the ones that tax rich people.
It’s all part of the cost…
You forgot the biggest expense; the billions of dollars in stock buybacks.
Have you seen all those hoes and bitches that get on those yachts and they all got their titties out and showing their ass and pussy. It's a great trickle down economy Ronny put together.
"Don't think he knows about second yacht, Pip."
CAD$650/month in Canada. I've lost 36 Kg (80 lbs) and I'm still losing weight. My blood work shows no signs of diabetes, my cardiac indicators are also excellent, but my hemoglobin is low because I don't eat beef anymore (not because of the Ozempic, I haven't been able to digest it for about six years.) I'm taking an iron supplement to build it back up.
Ozempic sucks until you stop fighting it. After that it's an easy ride.
I'm wearing an XL t-shirt and large sweat pants today down from 3XL in both eight months ago.
Any side effects?
It acts by slowing down the emptying of your stomach. That means that whatever you eat stays in your stomach for many hours. If you eat too much at night or something that is acidy or spicy it causes terrible heart burn and reflux/regurgitation. I take an omeprazole with sodium bicarbonate at bedtime to relieve the acid.
I eat a granola bar or a couple of eggs for breakfast then a small bowl of whatever is on offer for dinner and that's it. My stomach is never empty. Sometimes, if I want to have something spicy or acidy I will have it for breakfast. I've had a fajita for breakfast and I once had chicken parm for breakfast. Then I eat something easy for dinner.
The most upsetting side effect was the fact that I went from a daily bathroom guy to every three or four days. I was eating so much less and my body was making such good use of what I ate that I just didn't produce much. It can cause constipation but you need to avoid taking laxatives because you can become dependant. Just drink lots of water, eat lots of fiber, and walk a lot and you will be fine.
If you fight it it's going to make you miserable. If you lean in you will lose a lot of weight fast. I've lost so much weight so quickly that my body freaks me out a bit. When I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and look down at my legs I don't recognize them. I told someone a few weeks ago that I just wanted a little candy because I'm fat and she said, "No you're not."
On the plus side I mentioned to my doctor that I was getting shorter (in in my late 50s and went from 5' 10 1/2" to 5' 9 1/2" and he asked, "Your penis?" I said, "No, that's getting longer!" He laughed and said, "It was hiding." I've actually gained an inch and a half of useable penis. (That's a happy side effect.)
Ozempic sucks until you stop fighting it. After that it’s an easy ride.
Are there plateaus like with other weight loss?
I'm not eating any solid food due to a medical issue (long story) and I have lost 80 pounds as well. My weight can drop very quickly sometimes, as much as a pound every few days. Other times, like recently, it takes a long time to go down. It's taken me a good two months to go from 190 to 180, whereas I was 260 at the start of January 2023.
If not eating enough period causes plateaus, I would think Ozempic would as well.
I plateaued in the low 220s for a month or so then the weight fell off me to the low 200s. I'm creeping down now at about half a pound per week. My ultimate goal was to get to 200 lbs but I'm now thinking that I may go to 190 lbs since the weight is continuing to come off. I don't want to go lower than that. I don't want to be a thin person. I just want to be less fat.
My husband plateaued with it and had to go to a higher dose. No idea how common that is.
That's pricey. Here in the UK, I think it's like..hmm... $256 CAD. Still expensive though which puts it out of reach for a lot of people to keep it up regularly.
76.58€, here. 30% reimbursed by social security, probably another 30% by your work insurance.
I think you mean Wegovy, because I pay $220 for Ozempic at Costco, coworker pays $280 at SDM (Loblaws gotta take their cut)
Rybelsus the pill form of Ozempic is more expensive but I heard it's in the $400 range similar in price to Mounjaro.
You've gotta be on Wegovy
Edit: Also based on your replies below you're losing too much weight for it to be 1mg of Ozempic. Sure you lose some weight at 1mg but after a couple months you plateau and some of the side effects you describe are more inline with Wegovy. I've been on Ozempic 3 years and it affects my life absolutely zero at this point. It keeps my blood sugar in the optimal range and helps me avoid the snack food aisle but that's about it
There’s a lot of mistrust with drug makers at the moment, for good reason and this is a great article on the breakdown of costs. They do have a point about recouping the cost of R&D but maybe they should be more transparent about how long it’ll take them to do so. MBAs are very good at pulling levers to make money, they just don’t think about the human element, which is the most important lever.
Two points about R&D costs:
First, they aren't just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There's a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don't like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don't understand how science works.
Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.
All that said, they've clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.
If these were nonprofit companies and all employees were paid at/below market rates I would not complain.
It is the profit and CEO pay that I object to.
As I read that they charge just 155 bucks in other countries I guess the high price lies in not having a suitable health care system. You can't have both, calling other countries socialists or communists AND having good health care by having the same contracts that we have. Sorry.
Universal Health Care is what Americans should be rioting for. It is THE game changer in QoL and what really separats a first world country from a second world country.
Guys our government is broken.
$1500. That's how much eight weeks of ozempic costs for me if I had to pay out of pocket.
How much to get people together to steal the recipe and set up a lab?
Bet its less than a five year supply, which is probably just a week or two between a group og interested parties!
There are gray market microlabs that will already make it for 1/3 the cost. Since so many insurance companies deny Ozempic for people who are pre-diabetic (which would keep them from becoming diabetic) and Wegovy for people who are obese and have cholesterol issues (again, can actually help with this) but they are not morbidly obese, people turn to these places.
Doctors say you need it and will help you, but insurance companies tell you “nah”. Yet for some reason they cover it for the endless amounts of yoga Karens who don’t need it at all.
Where is Walter White when you need him
Jesse! We need to cook.
Seriously, no kidding but sometimes I think that people are still discovering capitalism
well you know the old adage, the bigger the margin, the better the rape
Guy looks like Bill Gates without hair.
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos did the Fusion Dance
"Mo-ney Ha!"
So why didn't anyone else start manufacturing it for $5 about 15 years ago then?
Patents most likely.
Interestingly its always libertarian types defending patents; rather than being against it for being government intervention.
In either case patents and copyright need reform for today's economy.
It was only approved very recently. Manufacturing it years ago would have been a waste, because you wouldn't have been able to sell it.
That's the thing.
Developing drugs, from a theoritical cure for something to an actual approved drug, normally takes years and a lot of drugs gets scrapped during this process. You don't just have to prove that the drug is not causing more harm, your also have to prove how effective it is. There a lot of full time employee people involved in everything from developing the actual chemical to executing clinical tests.
I'm not in any way defending the way "big pharma" acts today, but all of this is more complicated than a guy suddenly saying "I'm going to create a drug that cures cancer" and then just does it in 2 years.
So out of the 10 drugs you pour a couple of millions into the development of, just 1 or 2 might make it through and get approved. If you're lucky. So even if it's just costs $5 manufacture that specific drug, the company still have to cover the losses from the other 8-9 that never made it.
Once again, I'm not defending all pharmaceutical companies. I'm just saying that the manufacturing cost of a drug that is approved is far from the actual cost.
And a lot of people in my country are hoarding lots of Ozempic shots. Please remember this is for DIABETICS, and not for everyday weight loss.
In other news water is wet
I honestly don't get why so many people are so upset.
I get it with things like insulin where we know how to make it for years. But a new revolutionary drug? Sure their production cost is low but that doesn't include R&D and just think of how many drugs don't work. That's why when we do find something that works we can't expect it to only pay for itself, it has to make enough buck to basically pay for them as well, because why else even bother?
Most pharma R&D is actually done by the government. Unless they can prove it's an outlier there....
The government funds the first phase of the search. This is very important. But beyond that, the bill is footed by private sector.
A quote from this study:
The federal government is the primary funder of basic research in biomedical sciences through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This research is essential for informing all medical progress, including the development of therapies. Overall, 54% of basic science milestones are achieved by the public sector and 27% by the private sector. From that point onward, taking the necessary risks associated with the drug development process required to advance basic science research into safe and effective treatments for patients corresponds primarily to the biopharmaceutical industry. Performing Phase I through IV clinical trials consumes more than 90% of total research and development (R&D) cost.
A number of recent studies indicate that a majority of this R&D is funded by investments made by the private sector.1 In a 2019 report, Research America indicated that, in 2016, the private sector funded 67% of total U.S. medical and health R&D while the federal government supported 22%.
No idea on the statistics but this does happen. I think the onus is on the government to negotiate for the IP though. Big pharma is going to try to get the best deal they can and most of the time that's accepting tax dollars and then selling the drug at a more conservative markup to taxpayers. If the government contract was restructured to get the actual IP then they could offer another contract for production and get competing offers.
What the hell happened to Public Funding for Science and shit
That's only for diseases you can't milk a fat profit from like tuberculosis.
Would a publicly funded study into a weight loss drug receive a sufficient share of a government's research budget?
Someone that doesn't understand how much capitalism has done for research.
The scales aren't the same, the public would never allow that sort if risk, its completely impossible for governments to cause that amount of drug breakthroughs
It's also needed by type 2 diabetics. So I'd say pretty vital.
This is the dumbest thing I've read in a month. It was originally and still is a diabetes drug. Go lick more corporate boots.
R&D already disappears when compared to marketing or executive pay. Corpos whining about profits again
Likely not, no. Novo Nordisk spent $5 Billion on R&D in a year as a company. I can't find consistent numbers on advertising costs, but that looks to be somewhere around $100-200 million over the last 12 months, for this product specifically. The total annual compensation of the entire executive team at Novo Nordisk is about $46 million USD.
When you are overweight, it is not a case of just eating less. Eating less has very different physical and psychological effects for someone who is overweight than for someone who is not.
If you are interested in learning something about this, you can check out the setpoint theory of body weight. In short, the body has a setpoint for which weight it should be. If you are overweight, this setpoint is at a higher weight than if you are not. If your weight gets below the setpoint, your metabolism will slow down and your appetite will go up and the body starts to try and do everything to go back to this higher weight. That is why most people are not able to lose more than 10% of their weight in the long term. Often, when they gain the weight back, they gain back even more than they lost and the setpoint might even go up further. It is a neverending struggle for most people. Medication like Ozempic affect this mechanism so it becomes possible to lose weight.
If you want, you can find a lot of scientific papers about this. There is quite a lot of research on this and the setpoint theory is well accepted within the medical field specialised in dealing with weight problems, I believe.
In addition, Ozempic is not only a fat loss medicine. It is also used by people with diabetes to lower their glucose.
Im not smart in this at all, but i heard on a podcast, which sounds like bullshit but so does your set point thing, that bacteria had a lot of say so with our eating habits. The bacteria in our body that crave sugar influence our want of sugar? Its like a spiraling downwards trend- someone comsumes a lot of sugar- bacteria that thrives on sugar multiplies in our gut- that bacteria affects our body to crave more sugar- they get fed so we stay fat.
At the end of the day, someone can just eat less and fight thr cravings. Theres no way to agrue that eating 5000 calories are healthy. If you're 500 lbs and now need more calories to function then so what. Go without.
There was a study that looked at the children of parents who starved for a portion of their lives. And the children were better off because their body was prepared to fight starvation. No i wont cite it, because that i read about over a decade ago. So my point is, people can just eat less, screw what their body wants or thinks. Eat fucking less. Fast for a week every few months if you're overweight. Youre not gonna die, but you'll lose weight.
The set-point theory is junk science propagated by the HAES movement. Human bodies can't escape the laws of physics, if you eat less energy than you expand you'll lose weight unless your body somehow evolved the ability for photosynthesis or nuclear power.
It also regulates sugar and can be used as an alternative to insulin in many cases. The fact that it slows down the digestive process to make you feel like you're still full is a side effect compared to the sugar regulation.
That's why people take ozempic.
Also what you said is incredibly stupid.
There would still be a profit incentive in this case even if they charged 1% of what they're asking for. They'd still be making a 50% profit. A margin that would be highly favourable in basically any other industry. The whole point of market competition is to drive down that profit margin and pass the savings on to customers. A 95% markup like here demonstrates that the health industry is completely immune to market forces.
R and d would disaapear and no new drugs would be made if it wasn't for patents and profits.
True and I think no one expects any good to cost the same as manufacturing it, but the difference here is 200 times. That is bonkers.
R and d would disaapear and no new drugs would be made if it wasn’t for patents and profits.
Yes.
If people just ate less they would get the same benefit.
Well, yes, but actually no. We enjoy food for a reason, and the availability of all kinds of food today interferes with our bodies and brains, which were tuned to scarcity in ancient times. Most people simply can't eat less; that's why the majority never lose weight or regain it after some time. Meanwhile, health issues caused by being overweight are consistently among the leading causes of death in developed countries. Therefore, this fat loss drug is very important.
Literally almost every drug in existance.
Then after the parent rubs out, they make a slightly different version and repatent it.
Insulin: new formula now 0.0005% more effective for only 9000% increase in profit!
Whoo boy that typo had me going at first lol
Every neighborhood should have community drug labs (not just the sheriff's meth lab like we have now) and every pharma researcher should be spilling their guts or spilling their guts.
I dunno, Sheriff’s meth lab can help with the adderral shortage.