Jan 12 (Reuters) – Oral weight-loss drugs could make up a third or more of the overall GLP-1 market by 2030, a larger percentage than the company originally anticipated, a Novo Nordisk executive said on Monday.
“In our first assumption, injectables dominated the market and pills played a smaller role,” Ludovic Helfgott, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president for product and portfolio strategy, told Reuters on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference.
“We believe that the pill could actually represent up to a third-plus of that market overall as we go,” he added.
Helfgott said Novo’s updated view reflects a better understanding of patient behaviour in what he described as an increasingly consumer-driven obesity market, where many patients pay out of pocket.
The company believes its newly launched oral version of Wegovy can expand treatment to groups that have so far been under-represented in GLP-1 use, including men and younger patients.
He said some potential users of the new pill it launched last week do not fully recognize obesity as a disease or are “in denial,” arguing that an oral option “opens categories of population” that have been harder to reach with injectables.
The reassessment comes as analysts debate the long-term role of oral GLP-1s.
TD Cowen analysts last year estimated that the GLP-1 pills will account for a percentage share of the global obesity drug market in the mid-teens by 2030, which could reach $150 billion by then.
Late last year, Novo ran patient segmentation and targeting exercises, Helfgott said, using artificial intelligence models and other tools to classify potential new users of GLP-1s into six or seven behavioral groups.
The work is helping the drugmaker understand what motivates people to begin taking a weight-loss drug.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick and Mrinalika Roy; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
