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- [00:03]
A
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio news.
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B
So we spoke in December after you were granted US approval to launch your obesity pill this month, in January, the first drug maker to do so. I know it's early, but what has uptake looked like so far?
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A
It's been really exciting to. To launch. And I think when you go around this congress and hear the excitement, externally we are, of course, subjective, but externally, everyone being excited about it gives you a good feeling. The uptake has been good, but it's really early days for me to go into the details of it. But it really speaks to the fact that we also spoke earlier. There's been a lot of people that are excited about glp, one category weight loss, but did not want to take an injection. There's the taboo of injection, there's needle phobia, and. And they've been waiting. So. So we are super excited that we are finally having an offering for this large group of people that have been wanting a pill.
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B
And critically, you have a couple of months here when it comes to Eli Lilly. They're slated to get approval sometime in the next couple of months. How do you prevent your patients from switching to Lilly's pill, which I understand doesn't have exactly the same food restrictions as yours does once that is on the market?
- [01:17]
A
A couple of points. When we started actually deciding how to go into the oral segment and decided that we should put our protein and peptide and encapsulate it and take that route, most people thought that this is going to be impossible scientifically. You don't find examples of a protein, large protein, peptides, going inside orally and not being dissolved by the bite, by the enzymes of your stomach. We were able to do that magically, I would say. But now, of course, we're getting the fruits of that. We have for the first time the efficacy of our pill at 16.6%. When you take the drug being exactly equal to the pen version of it, the VGOVI pen, again at 16.6%, that of course is second to none. When you take a look at the data from all of our competition in late pipeline or early pipeline, no one has that efficacy. That I think is a big leap that we will talk to. Not least, of course we go V pill also have the CV benefits that our competition does not have at this point. So, so, so I'm incredibly grateful for that. Now, you talked about restrictions. I think there's a lot of drugs that have restrictions, including our own diabetes version of this called Rebounces, where we have one and a Half million patients on the product and not complaining whatsoever about that restrictions. We have this simple saying of sip and go. So I'm very thankful that we basically have been able to prove that on the, on the market with Rebo. And I'm very optimistic that we go V pill will show the same.
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B
Let's talk a little bit about production of the pill because you think about the amount that you need of the drug ingredient for the pill versus the shots. How profitable is it to make and produce the pills versus the shots?
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A
Well, if you could not make any financial gains or profits out of it, then we probably would not have launched it. So we have made a couple of things very clear. Again, it comes back to the skepticism and that going the peptide route orally is the wrong one because no one else has done it. That people first and foremost started telling us it's not scientifically possible. When we proved that right, then they started focusing, well, can you produce enough of it and is it profitable? And we basically tell people that we have produced more than enough of it. That's why we're launching it and that we are actually going to make a decent business out of this. So. So I'm very optimistic about this pill as we go forward. And again, the single biggest difference, and people have not understood that this is not a chemical entity, a small molecule, as almost all pills are. Because of that, you have an incredibly potent, effective pill at hand, which we have uniquely learned how to scale it and of course make a decent business out of it.
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B
So let's talk a little bit about pricing as well, because you were one of the several drug companies that signed pricing deals with the White House at the end of last year. So you think about Medicare, you think about Medicaid. How much of your obesity business do you think could actually come from those two avenues?
- [04:25]
A
What we have seen recently, of course, the lion's share of the business still is through the insured channels. And I think for a long time it probably remains that. But you have also seen that unfortunately through the insurance channels, even though the sheer number of people that have insurances are large. So 55 million people are insured with our WeGovy product because of all the restrictions that are put upon them, the pre authorizations and basically a lot of questionnaires that they need to fill. Many of these patients prefer to go through the cash channels and pay a reasonable amount of money, albeit a bit larger than their copay, but source the product from the cash channel. So we have seen both for us as well as our Competition that the growth recently has been through the cash channels. We will work very well with both of these channels. We will continue of course, working incredibly tight with our partners in the in short section, but continue to develop the cash channels as we do think that this is the future. In many ways.
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B
That's really interesting when you talk about, you know, the growth coming, coming from the cash channel. Are you able to quantify that, you know, the type of numbers that you are seeing?
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A
Well, last year we had basically had 10% of our sales coming through the cash channels and that we publicly said it's not good enough for our competition. I believe the number was around 30% or so. So we have set ourselves the goal to increase the number and, and go forward. But we also recognize that many patients necessarily want to come to your own website. We have a website called noblecarepharmacy.com which is good and now we have revamped it and I'm very proud of it. But the truth is that some people actually like to source the product from Ro, from LifeMD, from Weight Watchers, from Amazon Pharmacy and we should be able to basically allow them rather than try to force them to only come through our own channel. So what you have seen from our company over the last five, six months is major number of partnerships with all of these players so that patients don't need to move away from wherever they are, will join them and meet them where they are.
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B
Yeah, that's fascinating. Especially when it comes to the telehealth platforms. It feels like that's becoming ubiquitous in American life. I do want to talk a little bit about, you know, potential catalysts from here. Obviously the pill in that approval was a big one. But you think about the readout that you're seeing when it comes to redefine. What for that is Kagar Sema versus Set Bound. My understanding that's due in the first quarter. What's your confidence level as you're heading into that print?
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A
We have, we have two trials I'm looking forward to. There's Redefined 4 and Redefine 11. I would say on Redefined 4 we are trying to get non inferiority so, so that's really important to, to. To speak to. On Redefine 11 we have re changed our methodology and redesigned the trial a bit differently. It's here with American patients only and, and we are asking the patients to titrate, albeit at their own pace. So. So I'm a little bit looking more forward to Redefine 11 I would say. But. But on both of those, we will once again prove that cagrecema is the next generation of the product. And, and, and it's going to have not only a very decent efficacy, but much more than what we see in the market currently today, but also with a very reasonable tolerability, which I think comes from the amyloid molecule that really has proven to be a fantastic molecule in weight management when it especially comes to tolerability.
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B
So redefine for but especially redefine 11. We'll be keeping an eye out for that. I do have to ask you a little bit. When it comes to the politics of it all, we know that President Donald Trump isn't afraid feud, if you want to call it with Denmark over Greenland. Of course, you are based in Denmark. How do you make sure that what's going on at the government level doesn't impact your own dealings with the Trump administration?
- [08:25]
A
So I learned a long time ago that one of the benefits of working in the pharmaceutical industry is you could basically tell both sides of the, of the, of the politics that I'm here for the patients. My job is to put the patient at the center of everything that I do. And patients are my politics. And interesting enough, it doesn't matter if you're the right side or the left side of the political spectrum. You understand that because both sides often agree that improving health, especially at scales like we do, is the most important thing. So I will leave the politics to the politicians and my job is to really focus around expanding access to health care, which my company is synonymous for.
- [09:12]
B
Patience are your politics. I like that. I do want to talk a little bit about AI. We are sitting here having this conversation in San Francisco and AI and its potential when it comes to the health industry has definitely emerged as a theme. You think about Eli Lilly, the partnerships that they've signed with Nvidia, the news from this conference that Nvidia will invest $1 billion in developing a lab with Eli Lilly. How are you thinking about AI when it comes to your business? And could you anticipate Novo signing some sort of similar partnership with one of these AI companies?
- [09:44]
A
I would say that when you think about technology as a whole and pharmaceuticals, the pharma industry has been a bit conservative, adapting technology more, much less than some of the other, of course, industries that you see predominantly. Maybe because us as humans, we have shied away about sharing our health related data. As much as we talk about where we ate and where we walked on Instagram or Facebook, coming to discussing our health issues has been a little bit more reserved that is changing. I think AI is really becoming an interesting topic and I have no doubt I will answer many of the questions we have not been able to answer. If you think about our industry it's a lot about trials and errors and and really trying to figure out will this work or not with the help of AI I think those answers will be addressed much differently than we have been able to do without them. So I think from discovery to research AI is going to play a major role in understanding science and bringing molecules and drugs faster to markets. But also when you get into the regulatory front and being able to file for approvals I think you can also shorten the time. So my hope is in years to come you will see from the onset of an idea from a scientist to a placement of a product in a pharmacy you will see a shorter time horizon than today's 10 to 15 years which ultimately will benefit the patients.