By Jesus Calero, Stine Jacobsen and Maggie Fick
Gdansk — Novo Nordisk shares fell more than 15% on Monday, wiping away the last gains Wegovy’s launch had brought, after the drugmaker said its next-generation obesity drug, CagriSema, underperformed Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide in a trial.
The trial was designed to show CagriSema was at least as effective as tirzepatide in reducing weight but failed to meet that goal, the Danish group said in a statement.
It showed CagriSema achieved a 23% reduction in body weight over 84 weeks, compared with 25.5% for tirzepatide in the trial, Novo’s statement said.
Novo, which was worth more than $600bn in 2024, has shed about $400bn off that valuation, leaving the shares back at levels last seen before Wegovy transformed it into the world’s most valuable drugmaker.
By mid-morning in Copenhagen, Novo’s shares were trading at their lowest levels since June 2021, when its blockbuster weight-loss drug was first launched.
JPMorgan analysts said the trial miss was a big setback that could curb demand for CagriSema, temper long-term sales hopes and leave Novo struggling to win back share in the fast-growing obesity treatment market.
“While CagriSema could offer a new treatment option to patients, the inferiority to Zepbound means it is unlikely to help Novo retake market share in obesity,” they said.
The setback adds to investor worries about intensifying competition in obesity treatments, where demand is increasingly driven by drugs offering the greatest weight-loss results. Novo Nordisk was among the worst performers on Europe’s benchmark Stoxx 600 index on Monday. Shares of its Danish peer Zealand Pharma also fell 6.7%.
Eli Lilly shares rose about 4% in US premarket trade.
Novo Nordisk is fighting to regain first-mover advantage in the obesity treatment market, where demand for drugs with higher efficacy has surged.
Analysts had forecast before the results release that shares would be down at least 10% in the event of this scenario that several had seen as “low risk”.
Novo had positioned CagriSema as a more potent successor to its blockbuster Wegovy and a powerful contender to Lilly’s Zepbound, but two previous studies that found it delivered less weight loss than expected had already disappointed investors.
Tirzepatide is on the market and is sold in the US under the brand names Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for diabetes, as well as being marketed as Mounjaro in Europe as a treatment for both.
“This is a worst-case scenario for Novo, now it is clinically proven that Mounjaro is better than CagriSema,” Markus Manns at Novo and Lilly shareholder Union Investment said. “Novo will have an uphill battle launching CagriSema.”
Novo needed CagriSema to support its obesity business after patent cliffs in the early 2030s for Wegovy’s active ingredient semaglutide, Manns said.
“This is a fairly big setback,” said Henrik Hallengreen Laustsen, analyst at Jyske Bank.
“When we look at long-term estimates for Novo, CagriSema makes up a fairly large part of Novo Nordisk’s growth,” he said, adding that, according to consensus, 60% of Novo’s growth will come from CagriSema.
CagriSema is a weekly injection combining cagrilintide, which mimics pancreatic hormone amylin, and semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy that mimics the gut hormone GLP-1. In the study, Novo tested a fixed-dose combination of cagrilintide 2.4mg and semaglutide 2.4mg, while patients on tirzepatide received a 15-milligram dose. The Danish drugmaker plans to start a high-dose trial for CagriSema in the second half of this year.
Novo Nordisk chief scientific officer Martin Holst Lange said the company was “pleased with the weight loss” of 23% for CagriSema in the latest trial in its Redefine test programme. He did not explain why he was pleased.
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